Judith Collins casually lounging around her Office with its wall display of the mounted heads of her enemies

TDB has leant that a National candidate is pressuring the hierarchy for the National Party vote for Leader to occur as early as Tuesday this week instead of the set period of time as Judith Collins speaks over the Caucus directly to members.

A secret campaign has begun with National Party members flooding their local MPs demanding a vote for Crusher.

The tactic has worked with 3 of the lowest ranked National MPs changing their support to Collins in the last 48 hours.

The candidate is concerned that if the full length of time is allowed, Crusher supporters will have spooked young MPs into backing her.

TDB also learned that from an internal straw poll that Adams + Bridges can’t currently beat Crusher.

In my opinion Collins would be the most dangerous political Leader in modern times in terms of abuse of power. Tomorrow I will spell out what the Right really want inside National based on their secret strategy and why Judith as Leader would mean NZ is on the verge of taking a large step towards becoming a crypto Police State.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/18/exclusive-national-party-mps-spooked-by-judiths-rise/feed/0The Professor who highlighted National are merely a front for Chinese business interests receives threats and has her home broken intohttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/16/the-professor-who-highlighted-national-are-merely-a-front-for-chinese-business-interests-relies-threats-and-has-her-home-broken-into/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/16/the-professor-who-highlighted-national-are-merely-a-front-for-chinese-business-interests-relies-threats-and-has-her-home-broken-into/#commentsThu, 15 Feb 2018 23:58:59 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=97235

If we had a functioning news service staffed with people who understood the basic power dynamics of NZ and had a tiny amount of intellectual curiosity, this would lead the 6pm News bulletins tonight…

A New Zealand academic who made international waves researching China’s international influence campaigns has linked a number of recent break-ins to her work.

University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady, speaking today from Christchurch to the Australian Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee in Canberra, outlined three recent events which caused her concern.

“I had a break-in in my office last December. I received a warning letter, this week, that I was about to be attacked. And yesterday I had a break-in at my house,” she said.

She said this weeks’ burglary at her Upper Riccarton home was particularly suspicious.

“I had three laptops – including one used for work – stolen. And phones. [Other] valuables weren’t taken. Police are now investigating that.”

Brady also said her employer at Canterbury University had been pressured following earlier work on China’s Antarctic policy and – following a recent visit to China – sources she had talked to were subjected to visits from authorities.

“People I’ve associated with in China, just last year, were questioned by the Chinese Ministry of State Security about their association with me.”

These disclosures came after New South Wales MP Julian Leeser asked Brady whether her recent profile on the subject had resulted in any blowback.

…at a time when one of China’s best friends, Judith Collins, is about to win the leadership of the National Party, one of the few brave academics prepared to point out the power and influence Chinese interests have over our largest political party is receiving threats and her house broken into.

Having a Chinese spy actually inside the National Party is bad enough, but intimidating academics prepared to tell the public about China’s influence inside our political system is now going beyond dangerous into something darker.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/16/the-professor-who-highlighted-national-are-merely-a-front-for-chinese-business-interests-relies-threats-and-has-her-home-broken-into/feed/15The greatest enemy of the new Government isn’t the National Party, it’s the Public ‘Service’https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/16/the-greatest-enemy-of-the-new-government-isnt-the-national-party-its-the-public-service/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/16/the-greatest-enemy-of-the-new-government-isnt-the-national-party-its-the-public-service/#commentsThu, 15 Feb 2018 22:34:25 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=97218

Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash said many in the fishing industry were unhappy with the camera proposal and all options were on the table – including dumping it entirely.

One of Mr Nash’s first moves when he became the Fisheries Minister was to put the brakes on the rollout of electronic monitoring of the commercial fishing fleet.

The former National government came up with the plan last year, saying it would protect the sustainability of fish stocks and act as a deterrent against illegal activity, like fish dumping.

The greatest enemy of the new Government is not the National Party, it’s the self interested Ministry fiefdoms whose internal right wing ideological stance will strangle any real attempt at culture change or left wing policy implementation.

I’ve heard from numerous sources within the new Government over concerns that Ministers have been swamped by their Ministry’s and the vested interests of the Ministry Officials are what are being promoted and real change stymied everywhere.

Some Ministers are fighting back vigorously and some are demanding real change, but many are being swamped.

The Labour Party, Green Party and NZ First Party must urgently look to spend a percentage of their Leader’s budget to group fund a special joint politburo who can support Ministers in their battle to implement Party policy rather than get tricked and trapped by their Ministry’s.

This politburo should promote an 0800 whistle blower number to call on public servants with ethos to dob in their managers for not implementing compassion.

Borrowed money should not count as income that can reduce benefit entitlements, saysChild Poverty Action Group (CPAG).

In a case being heard in the High Court, the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) is arguing that a sole mother who took out loans to pay for her home repairs and to support her children – because she could not otherwise afford to on the benefit – should have to repay more than $120,000 in so-called ‘over payments’.

This Friday, October 27 is the last day of the hearing. Ms X. has name suppression and is represented by Frances JoyChild QC.

No form Ms X. ever filled out for her benefit asked her to list loans as a form of income. The cost of the nearly eight years of reviews and appeal is huge, both financially and in terms of her health.

“It has created libraries of decisions, exhibits, letters, submissions and court time. To say nothing of the costs of Ms X’s time or her lawyers,” says Associate Professor Susan John, CPAG economics and welfare spokesperson.

“It is very worrying that mothers are treated this way and that MSD takes such a narrow view of the law,” says Associate Professor Susan St John, CPAG economics and welfare spokesperson.

New Zealand currently has a punitive welfare system that reduces support for sole parents who repartner, and applies sanctions to those who do not name a father on benefit applications. In finding loans as declarable income, it further reduces the ability of low-income families to support their children, resulting in deeper and longer term poverty and more unfair prosecutions.

…this isn’t an isolated case. When asked by the Judge why the MSD was chasing another beneficiary in another ‘fraud’ case, the lawyer from the Ministry said, ‘in case she wins lotto’!!!!!!!

Our civil service has become uncivil.

Our Public Services are supposed to be the bastions of egalitarianism which are essential for a progressive liberal democracy progressing. Instead, spiteful zealots mutate it into the cruelest of torture devices used by the State to keep the poor too terrified to fight back.

Just like CYFs abusing kids or Housing NZ evicting tenants for 12 months and then wondering about the rise in homelessness or throwing beneficiaries off welfare and not recording what happens to them or Ministry of Development giving the homeless motel bills worth $50000, just like Corrections miscalculating Prisoner sentences – all of them don’t care about the actual welfare of the people they are supposed to care about.

Prisoners, the poor and beneficiaries have no rights as far as our burnt out and mutated public services are concerned, and attempts to push through new Government policy will fail if there isn’t a vigorous counter attack inside the Ministries.

One of these 3 men is going to stab the other two deep in the back and dump their corpses in a tunnel. Can you guess which one?

How did media go from ‘Bill has leadership wobbles’ to ‘there are no leadership wobbles’ to ‘oh Bill’s gone’ – where were all our political journalists?

When it’s Labour, the media have wall to wall coverage of Labour’s leadership worries for months on end, when it’s National they all seem to just believe ‘there’s nothing to see here, move along’.

If you can’t see this as a coup stretching back to the Todd Barclay leaks, then you don’t deserve to be a Political Journalist.

There has been a concerted campaign to destabilise Bill the moment the Todd Barclay leaks started in the middle of last year.

The way Winston’s super leak managed to damage everyone this group wanted to hurt.

The way Bill was purposely destabilised before the conference and the way Chris Bishop was set up with the snapchat allegations 24 hours before Bill stepped down so that Bishop couldn’t run are all obvious signals that this group’s grasp of dirty politics exceeds anyone else’s within National.

The winner will be the Collins/Bridges ticket with Judith as leader and Bridges as the deputy. This will immediately empower each of their pet Sith, Cameron Slater and Matthew Hooton.

If you thought Dirty Politics was bad before – prepare to see real horror.

Mark Mitchell is Judith’s boy and his entry into the leadership battle is merely to anoint him so that when he suddenly steps down from National 6 months before the next election to become the leader of the Conservative Party he gets a free run in his electorate and gives National their political partner to become the next Government.

It’s interesting that all the power players now moving into position to take the leadership are all former members of the controversial Slater and Lusk candidate preparation camps.

The Right are rising within National and expect them to usher in a level of dirty politics never seen before. They will ignite white rage and fan it with Chinese business money.

Think Simon Bridges is the reasonable member of that team? Watch this and watch the cute mask slip for a hard core right winger…

The real threat now to the new Government is that after banishing Matt McCarten, they have no one who can play at the level they need to protect themselves from a Slater/Hooton/Lusk onslaught.

There’s a great story about establishment National Party identities debating Judith ever becoming leader and their genuine fear – so the story goes – was that none of them could hand on heart ever rule out Judith declaring martial law.

This image more than any other sums up Bill’s legacy. New Zealand vs Old Zealand.

It is respectful to allow Bill English his day yesterday without comment, but today I’m really going romper stomper on all this ’27 years of public service’ praise by highlighting the enormous social policy damage this fundamentalist inflicted upon NZ

This line by the mainstream media that Bill English somehow saved NZ from the GFC highlights their media elitism. Bill English protected the middle classes from GFC by throwing beneficiaries onto the streets – that’s not a hero, that’s a coward!

And let’s be clear, I’m not be facetious here, when challenged about the Billion dollar hole in Government funds early in National’s rule and asked where he would make that money up, Bill simply told NZ, from beneficiaries.

What many always missed about Bill English is that he was a fanatical Catholic. For English, the greatest sin was state welfare which allowed the poor to gravitate towards secular institutions as providers instead of fearing God.

English has spent the last eight years deep in the budget books, where he is clearly a fiscal conservative, but nowhere near as ideologically driven as say, Ruth Richardson. On social issues however, this Catholic man is very solidly to the right.

He voted against the legalisation of same sex marriage. He voted against civil unions. He voted against prostitution law reform. He voted for a 2005 bill that sought to clarify that marriage should only be between men and women.

English is perhaps most vocal on abortions. In 1997 he said Parliament had “fallen short in our duty to protect the unborn child”.

Anti-abortion groups list him as a supporter.

As Health Minister, he actively attempted to reduce the number of abortions, introducing a booklet about “other options” and foetal development.

His wife Mary, who is a Wellington GP, is on a list of doctors who have reportedly refused to provide abortion services or contraception. She told NZME that the pair were “both conservatives on anti-abortion issues”.

…he was driven by a far Right God to redesign the neoliberal welfare state so that even less State money continues to support the valueless and sinful existence of solo mothers.

English was far more dangerous than Key ever was. Key was a self serving populist who looked after Key first, English was a religious zealot whose Southern drawl and dryness masked a hard right moralistic fanatic.

English rammed through hard right moral doctrine to appease his angry right wing God. He killed off secular Government social obligations which he saw were sinful by pretending to resource only the truly needy. It’s a clever way to fool people, but it’s simply making the neoliberal welfare state even more punishing and more draconian.

English focused on mutilating the State’s capacity to fund and dispense its social obligations so that desperate people are pushed towards God or Gods representatives on Earth.

English also stopped the recent cannabis reform in Parliament.

English mocked climate change.

English was the one who controversially signed off on the Kim Dotcom case that has put NZ on the hook for $6.8billion in damages if Kim wins.

English claimed to have seen the SAS footage where our troops are alleged to have committed a war crime and claimed he saw no evidence of that. When that tape finally surfaces, Bill will be proven a liar.

Bill’s deception over the Todd Barclay tapes gave a stark insight into how ruthless and manipulative he really was and staring down the barrel and telling NZ that Labour had a $11.7billion hole when he knew that was a lie was him at his most desperate to win.

And what of Bill’s beloved farming community that he cares for so much? What has he left them as a legacy? An industry that steals and pollutes water, that is selling base ingredients to China, who has many mortgaged up to the eyeballs because of dairy intensification and an industry that now faces oblivion because of technological advances in synthetic meat and milk.

All his life, from gay rights, abortion rights, marriage equality, climate change and cannabis reform, this man has been on the wrong side of history. In the end his religious fervour and his value system generated huge social welfare ideas that were more punishing and less compassionate than he ever intended, that’s because Bill’s sense of love never extended to his fellow human being, it was always set by a distant and angry God.

After 27 years of public service, Bill deserves his rest and he deserves his family time, but my only gratitude is that he has gone, not that he served.

Judith’s new ‘Leader of the Opposition’ office was controversial for it’s addition of an armoury and Cameron Slater as her Secretary. “Some say they don’t know what’s more dangerous, semi-automatic rifles or Whaleoil’, Judith cackled.

I don’t know what the hell was going through her mind, but Julie Anne Genter has sent this out…

…but Judith doesn’t care about Transport, she cares about building more bloody roads!!! Put that to one side, let’s be quite clear here, in my opinion, Judith Collins represents the greatest danger to NZ politics in its truest sense than anyone since Muldoon. Curwen Ares Rolinson

There’s a great story about establishment National Party identities debating Judith ever becoming leader and their genuine fear – so the story goes – was that none of them could hand on heart ever rule out Judith declaring martial law.

Judith’s deep connection with Slater and Lusk and the dark means with which ‘someone’ has been destabilising Bill’s Leadership since the Todd Barclay leaks alongside her Orivada scandal, her acquiescence to Chinese business interests and her need to stand down for an inquiry into whether or not she was planning a hit on the Head of the Series Fraud Office all mark her out as a threat to NZ democracy, certainly not its fucking champion.

I am going to believe that Julie Anne Genter is being sarcastic here, and that this tweet is a joke because NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE with any progressive intelligence whatsoever would allow someone as dangerous as Judith Collins anywhere near power.

And anyone championing Judith’s rise to power, can not be trusted with it themselves.

If your need for identity politics strips you of your wisdom, then you don’t deserve to be in the game in the first place.

But I am certain Julie Anne was being flippant and not genuine. It is however something Green Party members voting will need a clear answer to before they vote.

UPDATE: I have been assured that Julie Anne Genter’s tweet was a tongue in cheek joke.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/14/did-julie-anne-genter-just-lose-the-green-party-co-leadership/feed/14Bill English resigns as Leader of the National Partyhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/13/breaking-bill-english-resigns-as-leader-of-the-national-party/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/13/breaking-bill-english-resigns-as-leader-of-the-national-party/#commentsMon, 12 Feb 2018 22:37:14 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=97127

As TDB hasbeenpointingout, the destabilisation campaign against English has reached its moment and he has stood down.

The threat of a full scale civil war where details Bill didn’t want going public on right wing attack blogs are covered in the ooze of dirty politics.

Bill English destabilised as Leader before conference + Chris Bishop having snapchat allegations leaked to stop him running as leader = Judith Collins?

Watch now for the Collins/Bridges faction to manoeuvre.

The Right are on the rise. Cue clips of Judith Collins walking with the Imperial March from Star Wars.

The true status of our housing failure and inequality has been laid bare in todays damning report…

Housing Minister Phil Twyford has released a “sobering” stocktake on housing which has found homelessness was worse than thought and there was a growing “floating” population of people in insecure housing.

It warned that New Zealand was “quickly becoming a society divided by the ownership of housing and its related wealth”.

It also showed home ownership had slumped dramatically since the 1980s – especially among Pacific and Maori people – and Auckland’s housing problem was created by a mix of population growth, partly fuelled by migration, and the construction and land development sectors “hindering” housing affordability.

It also pointed to a potential time bomb in the impact on housing affordability on the elderly, finding the proportion of older people who were living in mortgage-free homes had dropped from 86 per cent to 72 per cent since the 1980s.

…here is the thing I just can’t comprehend.

How the fuck did it get this bad without the mainstream media screaming about this for 9 years?

How come an avalanche of social damage can build over 9 years and collapse without the mainstream media of NZ noticing for almost a decade?

Where was the critical analysis of National? Where was the holding the powerful to account? Well if you have a neoliberal media who conform to neoliberal cultural mythology of individual success, they can never challenge the right wing Government of the day.

The same panelists and pundits all vetted for their conformity to the neoliberal cultural myths alongside journalists who don’t rock the boat creates a complacency of opinion that misses and can not comprehend the reality until it explodes in reports like this one.

We didn’t just need a new Government last September, we needed a new media.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/12/the-real-question-behind-our-horror-housing-stats-where-the-hell-were-the-media-for-9-years/feed/7The headline shouldn’t be ‘National support Bill’ it should be ‘Bill English refuses to let Judith Collins become leader’.https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/09/the-headline-shouldnt-be-national-support-bill-it-should-be-bill-english-refuses-to-let-judith-collins-become-leader/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/09/the-headline-shouldnt-be-national-support-bill-it-should-be-bill-english-refuses-to-let-judith-collins-become-leader/#commentsFri, 09 Feb 2018 05:10:04 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=97003

The caucus retreat in Tauranga was preceded by a bout of leadership speculation with unnamed MPs saying they were preparing for the possibility English would stand down and suggestions there could be an attempt to roll deputy Paula Bennett.

At the retreat, MPs including those considered likely to stand for the leadership if English did stand down, were publicly backing him and Bennett to stay on until 2020.

“I’m not surprised, ” English said. “I’ve had strong support from the caucus and the party and from the large number of voters who voted for us, so support for me is not an issue.”

The headline shouldn’t be ‘National support Bill’ it should be ‘Bill English refuses to let Judith Collins become leader’. The unprecedented leaks before the Caucus retreat that were sent to destabilise Bill’s leadership were an attempt to see how much Bill would fight to retain the leadership.

Sources to The Daily Blog have said Bill’s decision to hold firm was because he was utterly against the possibility of Judith Collins becoming leader.

This now sets the scene for those forces who want to replace him to start a destabilisation campaign.

Expect to see attack pieces and leaks to start appearing on right wing attack blogs once the economy gets hit by a wobble so the rank and file are angry and reactionary.

We have a global economy that has been fed $15Trillion in quantitive easing, $10Trillion in bonds and the lowest interest rates for 5000 years. This market is so distorted now that the computer algorithms are mercilessly punishing human greed by forcing massive technical corrections.

But don’t panic.

As people see their Kiwisaver accounts get slashed and suddenly face hefty increases in their mortgage on houses that are grossly over valued , people barely holding on won’t be able to.

The reality is that markets have been horribly distorted and a hard crash has to occur. The reason Winston was so grim the night he picked Labour as the Government was because he knew this correction was coming.

There are enormous problems with the stability of the global economy that go to the very heart of neoliberalism and when the full impact starts to set in, people are going to start to panic. The danger point will be when people start pulling their Kiwisaver out of the stock exchange and put it straight in the bank, that will begin a run away event on the stock exchange as more and more Kiwis start frantically pulling their depleting accounts out of the market.

There comes a point when panicking becomes perfectly rational.

All eyes will be on the Dow Jones for Friday to confirm if this is the beginning of a much more fundamental sea change.

Because climate change is a political problem & not a scientific question, The Daily Blog is naming all cyclones after our MPs and Companies who have done so much to hold back genuine climate change reform – this new one that is joining our increasingly erratic and weather pattern is called ‘Cyclone Gerry’ in honour of Gerry Brownlee who did sweet FA in 9 years on climate change.

…which follows the reveal over the weekend of the worst kept secret in NZ politics…

…this contest is incredible and the hardest call I’ve ever had to consider.

Firstly, how lucky are the Greens to have two spectacular candidates compete in what will be a respectful and challenging contest?

I think both candidates are extraordinary and I think the Green Party membership have an enormous responsibility upon them to select a co-Leader who can lead at a time when so much of our Political debate is simply not presenting real alternative ideas and strategies to conquer the biggest challenges our species have ever faced.

So let’s look at the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates and what possible consequences could occur and what possible considerations need to be made for specific outcomes.

The disastrous election result where they lost half their support in the space of 2 months wasn’t a reflection on the policy platform the Greens ran with, it was horrifically incompetent tacticians which didn’t foresee what would happen to Metiria when she courageously announced her welfare fraud.

What SHOULD have happened is Metiria would have already paid the amount owed before admitting it. By leaving it an open issue, the mainstream media tore Metiria to pieces.

Nandor posted some thoughts on the political philosophy of where the Greens need to move towards in the future and I think his targeting of new generation small and medium ethical business is very smart.

The truth for the Greens is that their dreams of being a 15% Party are dependent on the strength or weakness at any given time of Labour. The Greens vote was actually far softer than anyone suspected and with Jacinda now in charge of Labour, it is unlikely to woo much of that back.

So where do the Greens grow? It can’t be at the exclusion of social welfare policy, but it could be an extension of Green values into business.

The Greens could gain support from NZ’s small and medium ethical business community by promoting ethical tax breaks for those businesses. The Greens are all about allowing the market to decide by using state regulation to send the market signals. What better signal could you send the market than by supporting and promoting ethical business?

If small and medium sized business complied with independently tested environmental, ethical and sustainability standards then they should be eligible for a tax break for making that investment.

Promoting Green values into business doesn’t weaken the stance they take on poverty, it simply broadens their voter appeal and that’s what the Greens need to desperately be doing between now and the next election because the vote they lost to Jacinda won’t just walk back to them.

Taking a far more proactive approach to woo ethical business is smart but if core activists feel that’s eroding its social justice obligations the Greens could just be replacing leaving supporters with new ethical and small business voters.

That’s why they need Marama as the new co-leader.

Her activist credentials are better than anyone else, she is amazing on policy and connecting emotionally with voters when she does media and the inroads into beneficiary votes that she begun needs time to work.

Marama has the intelligence, leadership skills and vision to retain the social justice and environmental values while Shaw can woo small and ethical business.

Julie Anne Genter: Here’s what I think about Julie Anne.

I want to hands up acknowledge that I have at times been very critical of Julie Anne Genter, and while I stand by those criticisms, I want readers to appreciate that I have an enormous amount of respect for her and that previous criticisms are wiped clean for this.

I had the pleasure of touring NZ with Julie Anne trying the Save TVNZ7 public broadcasting tour. She is insanely intelligent and possibly one of the smartest people I know. Her understanding of complex civil issues is probably only eclipsed on the left by David Parker.

The extraordinary leadership she has already stamped upon the Ministry of Transport is remarkable, her championing of human rights in the Ministry for Women is exemplary and the speed with which she has managed to tame those Ministries is actually one of the most important skills a genuine leader can bring to the table.

Julie Anne Genter has the intellect to get a legislative agenda set up and implemented, there really aren’t that many progressive politicians who could do that.

While to the ‘right’ of the Party, that has to be understood within the context of the Green Party because being a ‘right winger’ in the Greens still makes you one of the most left wing Labour MPs ever. I have had an opinion about that in the past, (as noted above), but given the contexts we now live in, only the fiercest Trotskyite would begrudge her an ideological stance inches closer to the centre than their own.

She is possibly one of the most talented MPs the Left has in Parliament right now.

But.

Let’s also remember that other candidates could throw their hat in the ring.

WILDCARD: Remembering that any member could nominate themselves to be co-Leader, a wildcard could be a member with real star power coming forward. I don’t know if Lucy Lawless is a Green Party member, but someone should sign her up!

Imagine if Lucy Lawless put her hand up for co-Leader? If she ran on a platform of raising visibility to consistently demand better outcomes for the environment and children in poverty, she could easily convince Green members that the star pulling power of an environmental activist and actor to the Green cause would be far better than the right or left of the Party fighting. Lucy Lawless could be the unifying candidate for the Greens while being an enormous boon for James Shaw.

It would generate global news, building the Green brand and make environmentalism a populist movement rather than just a political vote.

In Part 2 – I’ll look at the ramifications and issues to consider behind each of the candidates in the current political landscape.

I’ve noticed a new narrative line being developed in the mainstream media towards climate change.

The problem with deniers and minimisers was always going to be the actual weather. At some stage people would start looking outside their window at the extreme weather conditions and know in their bones that there was something terribly wrong.

So now we have the shrug and adapt narrative from the media.

Don’t get angry at these guys for holding up meaningful change…

…don’t demand that oil companies who knew for decades that climate change was a huge problem should be sued…

#ExxonKnew about climate change for decades, yet fueled a colossal denial machine to block any meaningful action to confront it. Now, thousands of us are fighting back.

…don’t get furious at the media who have been so slow to attach the climate change we are seeing to individual weather events or who see ‘balance’ as allowing climate deniers to share the stage with peer reviewed scientists.

Oh no, now we all just have to accept this climate change and adapt to it without ever acknowledging the role the powerful and the rich had in stopping any change.

This is as problematic as claiming the ‘market fundamentals‘ are somehow a touchstone against any wider issues.

There is truth in blaming the computers for their nano second trading that exacerbated the sell off because the majority of trading is now done at this millisecond speed, the problem is that because the majority of sell or buy bids are automatic algorithms, once these events take off they can’t stop, and these events will continue to occur as the treasuries market and interest rates being offered continue to offer better returns than the grossly over inflated stock exchange.

Blame the computers all you like, but also acknowledge that the 10 years of distorted markets due to trillions spent on quantitive easing has created a perfect storm where the AI of the computers becomes ruthless with the greed of the humans.

This has set off speculation that somehow this is corrupt because, you know, Hooton is the Head of Slytherin House and the architect of the Death Star and no matter how many times he tries to rub genial and jovial Ben Thomas onto everyone. he still provokes the Imperial March theme song in the same way Steve Bannon or Trump does…

… questions were immediately asked after people noted that the Inner Mongolia Rider Horse Industry donated $150 000 to the National Party…

…the problem of course is that Inner Mongolia is a separate region and is not Mongolia the actual country.

Unfortunately for conspiracy theorists, the actual truth is far weirder than fiction. Hooton has been doing consultancy in Mongolia for a very long time and visited the country as a Uni student.

He has the requisite contacts and skills and basic interest in the region to gain this, but it is also manages to muzzle him in his criticism of the current Government because as a Honorary Consul he has to at least pretend to respect the Government of the day.

I for one believe Honorary Consul’s should be forced to spend at least 50% of the year in their Consul’s country.

If Mongolia ever want to make a weapon of mass destruction or enact neoliberal social policy that would amount to corporate feudalism – Matthew Hooton is their man!

The second is that at some point, the shear weight of market technicals in a nanosecond trading AI algorithm rigged Casino is going to crash the ‘market fundamentals’.

What we have isn’t a fully functioning market secure with all the fundamentals, we have a waiting time bomb.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/07/the-myth-about-market-fundamentals/feed/11So what the Unemployment rate really says is we are all working harder and longer for lesshttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/07/so-what-the-unemployment-rate-really-says-is-we-are-all-working-harder-and-longer-for-less/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/07/so-what-the-unemployment-rate-really-says-is-we-are-all-working-harder-and-longer-for-less/#commentsTue, 06 Feb 2018 22:25:00 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96884

Employment grew more than expected and unemployment fell more than expected in the December quarter, despite lower business confidence and fears by some that the economy slowed during and after the election.

However, wage growth was relatively modest and broadly in line with expectations, reducing the risks that inflation and interest rates would rise sooner and faster than expected.

Statistics New Zealand reported the unemployment rate fell to a nine-year low of 4.5 percent in the December quarter from 4.6 percent in the September quarter after employment rose by 12,000 or 0.5 percent in the quarter. Economists had expected a slight tick up in unemployment to around 4.7 percent and had expected employment to rise by around 0.3 percent.

…let’s put aside the absurdity of working one hour a week meaning you are defined as employed, the realities here are that we have a work force working harder for bugger all wage growth.

Many workers are actually going backwards when you factor in rent rises and living costs that can’t be offset by property speculation.

It also highlights that the total number of under utilised workers, those working part time who want more work, number 343 000 workers.

There is little to cheer in these stats. We have a part time work force with a Precariat class who are at the whims of a brutal market while the wealthy plump up the medium wage.

The grim reality that the wealth creation built since the GFC in 2007/2008 is an illusion that can only survive on record low interest rates and insane Quantitate Easing is starting to sink in with the Dow Jones following up the 666 point loss on Friday with a horror 1175 point plunge today.

The trading was so extreme that at one point, as the Dow Jones slumped 1600 points, it was 1% away from the entire stock exchange being shut down.

Once it breached 1000 points, the computers took over and started a mass sell off.

The moment when the market realised that Trumps grand clothes were an illusion will spin the global economy.

The meltdown will hit NZ with higher interest rates on house properties people won’t be able to afford while they watch their Kiwisaver accounts get mashed.

The black swans are all coming home to roost and are being driven in armoured cars.

Could the current members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Opposition leader Bill English, NZ First leader Winston Peters, Greens co-leader James Shaw, the Minister Responsible for the SIS and GCSB Andrew Little, and National MPs Amy Adams and Chris Finlayson please explain to the good people of NZ why the fuck a private corporation with deep links to human rights abusers is helping the NZ Police commit mass surveillance?

The NZ Police are secretly working with a corporate human rights abuser who uses mass surveillance for nefarious means. Why are we allowing this to stand?

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/06/could-jacinda-bill-winston-james-andrew-amy-chris-please-explain-why-the-hell-the-nz-police-are-using-a-human-rights-abuser-for-mass-surveillance/feed/6Why Steven Joyce is about to be shot in the facehttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/05/why-steven-joyce-is-about-to-be-shot-in-the-face/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/05/why-steven-joyce-is-about-to-be-shot-in-the-face/#commentsSun, 04 Feb 2018 18:08:01 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96786

Once more to the breach of Steven Joyce’s face dear friends, once more to the breach!

The National Party is used to parachuting in Leaders. When the National Party values are as hollow with self interest as the Right’s are, National Party rank and file see parachuted in Leaders as simply a new marketing investment, they don’t get precious about not serving your time like the Left does, but there are limitations.

Steven Joyce is that limitation.

An outsider who was mates with Key, Joyce’s style of crony capitalism has locked out many on the Right who all get to collectively enjoy the public teat when their side is in.

This means Joyce has made an enormous amount of enemies.

Remember, Joyce went straight from candidacy into senior Cabinet Minister and wielded real power. While Nats accept parachuted in Leaders, they sure as Christ have no intention of losing the privileges and perks of power to someone as arrogant as Joyce.

Joyce has the favour of English so publicly demoting him would be a clear signal that the Collins/Bridges faction are now calling the shots.

Joyce is the canary in the coal mine for any Leadership challenge.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/05/why-steven-joyce-is-about-to-be-shot-in-the-face/feed/7Waitangi Day 2018 – The joy of a leader who understands the Treaty, Māori will vote Jacinda forever & how Iwi Leaders have to acknowledge the political rise of Urban Māorihttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/05/waitangi-day-2018-the-joy-of-a-leader-who-understands-the-treaty-maori-will-vote-jacinda-forever-how-iwi-leaders-have-to-acknowledge-the-political-rise-of-urban-maori/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/05/waitangi-day-2018-the-joy-of-a-leader-who-understands-the-treaty-maori-will-vote-jacinda-forever-how-iwi-leaders-have-to-acknowledge-the-political-rise-of-urban-maori/#commentsSun, 04 Feb 2018 16:10:25 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96452

Waitangi Day 2018 smells different doesn’t it?

It tastes different too.

No bitter ‘Māori privilege’ nonsense from Don Brash and his shallow racism.

No spiteful ‘Let’s have a NZ day so we don’t have to feel guilty about the Treaty’ whining from Newspaper editorials.

No constant media barking up of predictions of aggression and protest.

Jacinda’s desire to show Waitangi Day the respect it deserves with a 5 day tour visiting every Marae large and small alongside Ministers meekly lined up to do the BBQ cooking for Waitangi Breakfast is building a movement of aroha amongst Māori which will create a legacy relationship that is going to dominate Māori politics.

The electricity when she visits Marae is palpable and extraordinary. Her incredible ability to connect emotionally with people has generated a rapport amongst those packed Marae she’s visited in a way that will earn her devotion amongst voters while forgiving any shortcomings.

If she makes this 5 day tour an annual event she will build a following that will see Māori voting Labour because of their relationship with Jacinda for her entire political lifetime.

Her being pregnant is just the emotional cherry on the top, Māori in Northland have taken to Jacinda with nothing short of joy and her visiting everywhere has conjured up an excitement that will bind.

They will speak about Jacinda passing through for decades to come.

Look at this…

…Labour just won every heart and mind in the North – Jacinda is building a legacy relationship.

This personal relationship is going to cement Labour Party dominance of the Māori electorates leaving any resurgent Māori Party under a new leader like Dr Lance O’Sullivan with only the right for political movement because Labour will totally dominate the Māori vote on the general roll and the Māori roll.

With Jacinda building a huge reservoir of Māori voter support and the Māori faction inside Labour now one of the most powerful factions inside Labour, this puts the Iwi Leaders Forum, the Maori King and the Public Service all in a troubling position.

Many Māori live in urban areas and are not tribe affiliated. Their needs for better social services, jobs and the legacy issues created by colonialism trump Treaty deals which is offside to the goals of the Māori King or the Iwi Leaders Forum. With urban Māori having a far more powerful voice inside the new Government, those movements will need to see any extra resources making a dynamic impact on the poorest.

But there’s another segment who are about to face an existential threat – the Public Service.

Māori know first hand the structural racism of the social service providers who care more about the building of fiefdoms than the actual welfare of Māori. Already the Public Service is strangling Ministers with Ministerial suffocation but the new Māori faction aren’t going to accept that.

Māori social service providers offer a wealth of cultural initiatives that bring a holistic view to caring about people and the Public Service will either need to adapt to those new initiatives or they’ll face an ongoing battle with a Māori faction that knows damn well how the Public Service denigrate their people.

The crowds thronging Jacinda on every Marae suggest it’s a fight the Public Service are going to lose.

I make this following criticism of Te Reo posturing as some one who can’t personally speak Māori (I mangle the english language badly enough and I don’t want to mutilate that beautiful tongue) and who enrolled his daughter into a Te Reo immersion class because as a New Zealander, the treasure of Te Reo is a gift that is part of her birth right.

Here she is in last years Kapa Haka performance…

…so those things noted, for me the current level of Te Reo posturing from smug pronunciation on Radio New Zealand to Macron policing to Millennial’s swamping introduction to Te Reo classes as an aesthetic seems to miss the point and starts becoming middle class wank.

Is it good enough in 2018 to champion Te Reo when the structural injustice of colonialism is so prevalent and apparent?

Māori are 380% more likely to be convicted of a crime, 200% more likely to die from heart disease & suicide. Māori are paid 18% less and 34% leave school without a qualification. Māori at 15% of the population make up over 50% of the 10 000 prison population. They are arrested at a higher percentage, feature in the worst education and social stats and make up a huge proportion of those living in poverty.

After losing 95% of their land and economic base in less than a century and overcoming almost being wiped out by disease and muskets, Māori have been cheated by the Treaty.

I believe that the majority of white New Zealanders live in a constant state of wilful ignorance when it comes to racism in this country. The facts of how racist our system really is are glaring in the statistical outcomes, and have come under investigation by the UN but still we have the Don Brash’s of this country screaming Māori privilege.

The NZ Herald’s first editorial ever was calling on white settlers to go to war with Māori and remember their attempt to promote ‘non conflict Waitangi Day news’…

…it took 136 years to get an apology for Parihaka, who will apologise for the racist failures of NZ since the Treaty?

Knowing your Te Reo is simply cultural appropriation if it isn’t coupled with the same level of effort in cementing into place the power dynamics laid out in the Treaty

For me, I love the Treaty because of the relationship of responsibility it immediately sets up between the Crown and its people. I believe the sense of ownership in the Treaty needs to be expanded to all NZers and not just Māori because it sets out the obligations of the Crown to protect the rights of its people. We deserve as a nation to entrench the Treaty as the basis of our constitution so we can force Governments to protect our rights rather than strip us of them.

Pakeha want to gloss over the theft and confiscation of indigenous lands because it’s a shameful denial of the promise of a Treaty between two peoples and when you consider the paltry compensation that has been paid back to Maori via the Waitangi Tribunal, it’s a mere $1.4 Billion.

$1.4 Billion for confiscating the majority of NZ??? What is most egregious is that some Pakeha have the audacity to claim that pathetic reparation is a ‘gravy train’.

Hilariously enough, NZ is up for $6.8billion in damages from the Kim Dotcom case and if successful would mean he gets paid back over 4 times as much as has been paid out for the entire confiscation of the country.

We should be thankful that Māori have been so generous in their forgiveness of this atrocity. Watch the fury of pakeha having to mow their berms to appreciate how one sided our preciousness of ownership is in this country.

What does actual power sharing look like and how can Pakeha feel empowered rather than resentful?

One of the problems with NZ politics is that we have a unicameral Parliament, that means we just have one chamber with no upper house. This means NZs Parliament is one of the most powerful Parliaments in the world. It allows for legislation to be read straight into law and is one of the reasons why the neoliberal revolution was so ruthless and impossible to reverse.

I think one solution to the Waitangi Tribunal ruling is to consider a NZ Parliament Upper House that has 50-50 representation between Maori and Pakeha. If Sovereignty was never signed away, then the Government of today has a responsibility beyond paltry compensation for past injustices , it must provide real power sharing solutions.

Having a 50-50 Upper House with the power to delay legislation that was not in the best interests of the Nation when it comes to Treaty issues would stop Government’s from fire sales of national assets, prevent things like the Foreshore and Seabed legislation from becoming law and prevent water rights from benefitting corporations.

An Upper House would be seen as a guardian of the Treaty for the maintenance of public well being over private gain, it would show real power sharing and for Pakeha, it would represent a political body that protect their public interests as much as Māori interests.

Speaking Te Reo without also committing to actual political power seems to me to be middle class wank.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/05/waitangi-day-2018-how-te-reo-posturing-is-becoming-empty-middle-class-wank/feed/17Winston does right thing – drops case against journalists, targets National Party scumhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/winston-does-right-thing-does-case-against-journalists-targets-national-party-scum/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/winston-does-right-thing-does-case-against-journalists-targets-national-party-scum/#commentsFri, 02 Feb 2018 04:49:01 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96708Winston has done the right thing by dropping his case against the Journalists involved in publicising leaks about his super overpayment.

It is unacceptable for a politician, let alone a Minister or the Deputy Leader of a Government to attack journalists for doing their job.

It doesn’t matter what they revealed, that’s their job, they have special rights and privileges to protect their sources no matter how distasteful this leak was.

The issue now focuses on the National Party Scum who were more than happy to use private information to attack Winston with.

It turned out that the Chief of Staff was then told of this, other Minister’s were then informed and surprise, surprise someone leaked to Lloyd Burr.

National say they have no idea how this possibly damaging information was amazingly leaked just before the election.

Really?

This is a Government who colluded with the Secret Intelligence Service months before the 2011 election to falsely smear Phil Goff, does anyone honestly think they wouldn’t breach every rule of privacy to smear Winston Peters?

If this Government was prepared to collude with the state spies to destroy a political enemy, they wouldn’t blink twice about releasing information like this.

All power to Winston’s arm in attacking the Nats for such a contemptuous breach of privacy.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/winston-does-right-thing-does-case-against-journalists-targets-national-party-scum/feed/6When Hooton is going public that means the National Party Leadership Coup is in full effecthttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/when-hooton-is-going-public-that-means-the-national-party-leadership-coup-is-in-full-effect/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/when-hooton-is-going-public-that-means-the-national-party-leadership-coup-is-in-full-effect/#commentsFri, 02 Feb 2018 02:56:34 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96703

Hoots has gone public in the NBR with his musings on the National Party Leadership Coup…

…this is kinda hilarious for a whole bunch of reasons.

Hooton is pretending to be some kind of passive observer to all of this when the reality is he is up to his armpits.

His candidate/mate/Manchurian candidate is Simon Bridges. Bridges is being lined up as the Deputy to Judith Collins Leadership.

Collins/Bridges have the numbers, all that is being debated is how to kill off Bennett and Joyce whom are hated.

Pundits pointing to the great Polling National have (going higher than they polled on election day in both polls) as reasons why Bill will survive utterly misread the vibe inside National.

Inside National, people are furious they were cheated out of winning, those climbing Poll numbers are simply aggravating that anger, not appeasing it.

Collins/Bridges would bring together the most angry and powerful factions of the National Party including the elevation of Hooton and Slater into Princelings of the dark arts.

This collaboration alone has the ability to generate a level of dirty politics that goes beyond anything this country has ever seen.

Remember the claim that Slater and Jordan Williams were attempting to take out Colin Craig so they could take over the Conservative Party? That’s because there is still a solid 3% vote out there that is Conservative vote and if an electorate MP from National were to suddenly step aside to become the new Leader of the Conservative Party and get run unchallenged in their former electorate and bring in 3% off the coat tail function of MMP, National + Conservatives + ACT could easily be the Government in 2020.

National hierarchy are terrified of Collins being leader because she is completely uncontrollable and they are frightened of what she would do with the power. The clock however is ticking on Bill’s leadership and the longer he stays the more likely leaks he doesn’t want coming out start coming out on Whaleoil.

The dice are loaded and the hard Right within National is rising. With economic meltdowns looming, the stage is set for the Crusher to crush.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/when-hooton-is-going-public-that-means-the-national-party-leadership-coup-is-in-full-effect/feed/18Pike River re-entry, Royal inquiry into state abuse and Child Poverty legislation – this is what political leadership looks likehttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/pike-river-re-entry-royal-inquiry-into-state-abuse-and-child-poverty-legislation-this-is-what-political-leadership-looks-like/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/pike-river-re-entry-royal-inquiry-into-state-abuse-and-child-poverty-legislation-this-is-what-political-leadership-looks-like/#commentsThu, 01 Feb 2018 18:43:22 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96674

…this is what real political leadership looks like and while there are concerns and legitimate criticisms to be made on some of these issues and we should voice those concerns, it is still an incredible achievement in 100 days.

However.

While this is all a great start, we still have a neoliberal welfare system filled with horrendous and awful human beings who enjoy the humiliation and domination of others. We still have WINZ staff who are crucifying the poor, we still have a culture of hunting down beneficiaries like dogs, we still have draconian welfare policy, renters with few rights, counter productive Prison policy, greedy Landlords, mass surveillance abusing Police, SIS and GCSB, entire generations locked out of home ownership and a Human Rights Review Tribunal that doesn’t have the funds to hold the State to account.

We have 370 000 kids living in poverty, 41 000 New Zealanders homeless, over 10 000 imprisoned, over 600 official suicides with suggestions it could be 3 times higher, 550 000 suffering hardship and 1600 dying annually from cold houses. Those numbers aren’t changing today or tomorrow and while the new Government has promised hope in the future, those NZers need change now.

That is the true test of the new Government, and currently they don’t have a public service that can do anything other than harm.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/02/pike-river-re-entry-royal-inquiry-into-state-abuse-and-child-poverty-legislation-this-is-what-political-leadership-looks-like/feed/4Why the latest political poll is not great news for the Lefthttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/01/why-the-latest-political-poll-is-not-great-news-for-the-left/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/01/why-the-latest-political-poll-is-not-great-news-for-the-left/#commentsThu, 01 Feb 2018 08:39:11 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96669

Many were jumping with glee over the Newshub first poll of the year.

I think that joy is misplaced because the Poll is not great news for the Left. Like the last Q+A poll of 2017 (which changed polling methodology to one that should favour voters of the Left) this new one should concern us because in both Polls, National went up.

Thats right, National are still climbing in the Polls, they aren’t going down.

That should be bloody scary, because if National manage to create a side project Political Party in a safe National seat, the game will be all over.

If National stood aside for a new Conservative Party in a safe National seat, or had a current electorate MP ‘leave’ National to create a side project Party, they would overwhelm the Left.

There were two things that stood out for me during Trump’s State of the Union address.

The first was his need to laud the courage of others who were tested in situations his policies are exacerbating.

If Trump had one inch of the courage of the heroes he hid behind, we wouldn’t despise him so much – that he requires their acts of conscience to gloss over the lack of his, is the real story.

The second thing that stood out was his constant use of economic statistics to justify his first year in Office. Trump has injected the US economy with Meth in the form of inane corporate tax cut welfare and is now congratulating himself for the erratic heart beat and psychosis.

This address was billed as bipartisan but Trump doesn’t build bridges, he napalms them and then blames the fake media for pointing out he’s burnt them.

This is a man who will say Black on Monday, White on Tuesday and then by Friday scream that no one cares about colours.

Last night, these petty cowards in Parliament voted down medicinal cannabis reform.

These fucking base hypocrites!

So what Parliament is saying is that it’s okay to kill yourself if you are in pain, but it’s not ok to smoke a joint if you are in pain – what sort of a Circus Freak show of a Democracy is this? The double standards are sickening and outrageous!

Want to kill yourself because you are in pain? Oh we will rush that through to select committee immediately despite the enormous question marks over that. Want to smoke a joint because you are in pain? Oh no you don’t, back to letting the cops bust you and arrest you thanks.

Those who voted against this are disgusting parasites without any spine, guts or stones. Meanwhile tens of thousands of New Zealanders suffer the fear of Police brutality and Criminal gangs to get a medicine that alleviates their pain while these gutless fucking swine sit on their fat comfy arses on the leather seats of privilege.

Last nights defeat is proof positive that the sham democracy we slave under can not adapt to the realities of our lives as citizens. It is a reminder that the only way to stick it to these pompous fuckwits is to take matters into our own hands by way of a binding referendum.

I want to target one particular scum bag, National Party wonderboy – Chris Bishop. Listening to your bullshit excuse as to why you wouldn’t vote because it didn’t have ‘enough regulation’ was sophistry of the highest order.

Aren’t you a former tobacco lobbyist you filthy clown? Didn’t you peddle a product a thousand times more lethal than the one you just voted against?

Fuck you, you lying hypocritical maggot.

This is the National Party, the party of liberty and personal choice – what a load of corrupt sleaze bags with the ethics of vultures on meth.

Everywhere in the world where meaningful cannabis reform has occurred, it has done so because people put it to a referendum beyond the cowardice of politicians.

We will fight to get that referendum up in time for the 2020 election and on that day when we win, we will ram its results so far down the throat of these arseholes they gag themselves another set of lungs.

Respects to Chloe and the Greens for championing this and for running with it, their courage is to be saluted.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/02/01/the-list-of-cowards-who-voted-against-chloes-medical-cannabis-bill/feed/64So how easy would it be for Kim Dotcom to successfully sue the NZ Government for $6.8billion? Horrifically easy!https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/31/so-how-easy-would-it-be-for-kim-dotcom-to-successfully-sue-the-nz-government-for-6-8billion-horrifically-easy/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/31/so-how-easy-would-it-be-for-kim-dotcom-to-successfully-sue-the-nz-government-for-6-8billion-horrifically-easy/#commentsWed, 31 Jan 2018 01:34:10 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96571

Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom sues New Zealand for $6.8bn An internet entrepreneur accused of masterminding one of the largest copyright infringements in history is suing the New Zealand government for $6.8bn in damages — equivalent to 3.5 per cent of the Pacific nation’s GDP — over the destruction of his business. Kim Dotcom, who is fighting extradition to the US, alleges Wellington unlawfully issued an arrest warrant in 2012 that resulted in him being on bail for six years. This act damaged his reputation, restricted him from leaving New Zealand and left him under the threat of extradition, according to court documents. Mr Dotcom, a 44-year old German-Finnish national, is seeking damages for lost profits from Megaupload, the file-sharing site that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered shut down in 2012. He alleges the business, in which he owned a 68 per cent stake, would now be worth $10bn. “I cannot be expected to accept all the losses to myself and my family as a result of the action of the New Zealand government,” Mr Dotcom told the BBC.

There are 2 reasons why you as a NZer should care about the Kim Dotcom case.

The first is the unbelievable injustice of the entire fiasco. Kim was illegally spied upon by the GCSB, he was set up by NZ immigration services so that he would enter the country in the first place, our security apparatus slavishly followed US agencies with a live feed to the NSA during the raid, the entire event was politically motivated after Corporate Hollywood threatened to with-hold donations to Obama’s Presidential bid if they didn’t make a symbolic gesture against internet piracy, and the case against him is so weak it looks like incredible over reach by our authorities and US authorities…

In submissions put forward by Dotcom’s US lawyer Ira Rothken yesterday, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig said the United States allegations lacked merit.

Mr Rothken told Morning Report today that the legal team was very pleased to have someone of Professor Lessig’s status say that Dotcom committed no crime.

“We think that it’s not only beneficial for Kim Dotcom, but for internet users across the globe, who make use of technologies like cloud storage on a daily basis.”

The United States has been trying to extradite Mr Dotcom since January 2012, when he was arrested on copyright and money-laundering charges relating to the now-defunct Megaupload website.

Later that year Mr Dotcom was found to be the subject of illegal spying by the GCSB, after which an independent review of the bureau was ordered.

Mr Rothken said the case against Dotcom should have been thrown out before it was even filed.“We think the United States should take a look at this and seriously re-evaluate their case.”Dotcom will appear before the court on Monday.

…this case has been an abomination of legal process, jurisdiction and injustice. You might not like Kim Dotcom, but the manner in which his rights have been breached and 70 odd armed paramilitary cops broke into his home and terrorised him and his family is as unacceptable as the abuses of power used in court against him.

This is not what our justice system should be used for, we are not a puppet for US interests, we should be a sovereign state with our own laws and judicial system that is beyond influence by America and their corporate overlords.

But the injustice of this case may not move you. You may have bought into the media hype of Dotcom as a Bond Villain and enjoyed his failure at the ballot box. You may have decided that despite Assange, Snowden and Greenwald proving at the Moment of Truth that John Key lied to us about mass surveillance, that Kim fell short of what he promised and he got his just desserts.

If you fall into that category then the possibility of being sued if this goes south may concern you…

New twist in Kim Dotcom caseThe managers of the nation’s finances were kept at arm’s length when the Kim Dotcom case required Kiwi taxpayers to underwrite a potential future legal suit from the internet entrepreneur, a new document shows.

Instead, then-police commissioner Peter Marshall signed the “undertaking in respect to costs and damages” – the agreement which would allow Dotcom to sue New Zealand if it emerged the FBI case against him was unfair and unfounded.

It was the first time that the Crown was required to give an “undertaking” in a case where the property of someone facing charges was seized and was because the charges were brought by a foreign agency.

The need to provide an “undertaking of liability” emerged after police seized the tycoon’s cash and property without notice. The law required Dotcom have the chance to challenge the seizure and be given formal notice of his right to sue the Crown.

The need to provide an undertaking in March and April 2012 surprised the Crown and the Herald sought details of the debate and consideration over the risk to which NZ was exposed through the Official Information Act in July 2012. Treasury refused to supply the information sought so the Ombudsman was called on to investigate.

After three years of deliberation, Chief Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakeham found there was a “public interest” which would be met by releasing a summary, which Treasury sent to the Herald this month.

The summary showed there were meetings “to discuss the case and how to inform ministers” were held Crown Law, police, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice and Treasury.

On March 22 2012 Finance minister Bill English was told he “did not have a role in approving or signing off this kind of undertaking”. Instead, it was the Commissioner of Police’s role under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act.

While Mr English was kept briefed – including a briefing from Mr Marshall and Attorney General Chris Finlayson – there was no process established through which he was able to be formally involved in the undertaking.

Under the Public Finance Act, Mr English is responsible for matters which might impact on Crown accounts. Dotcom has claimed the loss of Megaupload cost him more than $2 billion although others have argued the impact is far less.

The summary provided to the Herald said there had been a review of the mutual legal assistance framework of which Treasury was a part. It “intended to use the forum to recommend the establishment of a consultation process and set out criteria for issuing undertakings”.

The requirement to give an undertaking to the court to meet any damages was a factor which put Sony off joining a civil case seeking to claim Dotcom’s assets, emailed hacked and released last year revealed. Sony’s top copyright lawyer, Aimee Wolfson, said it was “not at all unimaginable” Dotcom would avoid extradition or even successfully defend himself in the United States.

The studio is not a participant in a case in NZ courts with discussion in the emails showing potential exposure to a legal suit from Dotcom concerning executives.

The risk to which New Zealand is exposed was underscored by a legal opinion released today from Harvard University’s professor of law Lawrence Lessig, one of the world’s leading experts on copyright law. He said the FBI charges would not stand up in US courts and there was no basis in law for Dotcom to be extradited.

…let’s re-read that again. Sony decided not to sign up to the case against Dotcom because they believed there was a chance he would get off these trumped up charges and in turn sue everyone involved in taking him down to the tune of $6.8billion???

National signed us up to this so they could suck up to America who wanted to stamp their jurisdiction over cyberspace and to ensure Corporate Hollywood continued to donate to Obama’s re-election campaign.

This entire spiteful episode has been a blunder and needlessly cruel – that the case could fall to pieces and Kim could successfully sue NZ seems the only righteous outcome.

Let’s see how many sleepy hobbits are laughing if Kim Dotcom wins at the Supreme Court.

The rumour mill has been running hot all month about the moves against Bill English, it’s finally spilled out to Barry Soper so it’s as close to official as it’s going to get.

Here’s the most feared outcome. Judith Collins is teaming up with Simon Bridges to take out the Leadership with Judith as Leader and Bridges as Deputy. Co-conspirators are meeting in Bridge’s electorate to plot the coming coup.

The attacks against Bill were started late last year when ‘someone’ started leaking the details of how much English knew in the Todd Barclay affair. That ‘someone’ was heavily rumoured to be someone inside National who wanted Bill weakened.

That ‘someone’ will be instrumental in the new coup now.

Bridges is the future of the Party and is incredibly smart. He played the new government horrifically by simply having a puzzled look on his face for the first day of Parliament. He is also great friends with Matthew Hooton so expect the Hoot to be eye ball deep in the coup.

The reason why Collins is likely to be Leader is because only she can truly manipulate the spite, hate and anger deep inside National voters who believe they were cheated. She can turn that ugliness into political muscle and she is a fan favourite of the Chinese ‘Blue Dragon’ faction inside the National Party who are now the most powerful faction inside the Party.

If Judith becomes Leader with Bridges as Deputy that means Cameron Slater (Judith’s de facto son) and Matthew Hooton (Bridges’ de facto best friend) will have unprecedented influence and power.

While the new Government stumbles over itself to be inclusive, our enemy grows and is about to become vastly more powerful while some of the most venomous political thugs get welcomed back into the Leaders Office.

It will need far more rational players inside National to stop this, Paula Bennett had been groomed as the safe replacement to block Collins from becoming Leader because National Party Leadership are terrified what Collins would do with the power, but it looks like they have failed to stop Collins and Bridges building momentum.

The other rumour pushing for Bill’s replacement within National is the belief that the video footage of the SAS war crimes in Afghanistan which Bill claims he has seen and doesn’t show war crimes is actually ‘out there’ and it is only a matter of time before it is made public which will make Bill’s claim that there was no war crime look indefensible.

Watch where Maggie Barry, Mark Mitchell and Jami-Lee Ross jump to see if Judith will become the new Queen.

National leader Bill English has continued to slam a “pathetic attempt at bipartisanship” from the Government on child poverty but acknowledged today a briefing was offered in 2017.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Tuesday that she had written to English on the 13th of December outlining the bill and offering a briefing on her new child poverty measure, which the Government intends to write into law.

She was responding to English’s criticism on Monday that the Government was talking up bipartisanship around the issue but didn’t offer a briefing on the measure until Wednesday, when the legislation was due to be introduced.

…by playing up the bi-partisanship desires, Labour have opened the door for English to criticise Jacinda for effectively lying and not being genuine in her offer.

Here is the actual timeline…

…instead of championing a new Child Poverty legislation while flaying National for implementing failed right wing experiments that hurt those kids in poverty, we are arguing about whether Jacinda is being honest with Bill English!

This is not the debate the new Government should be having! Their desire to be inclusive only works when you have an Opposition that is genuinely constructive, at what point will the Labour leadership team comprehend that National are vicious power hungry born to rule pricks?

When does Labour learn you can’t work with National?

How many times does National need to spit directly into Jacinda’s face before someone realises that bi-partisianship simply makes the new Government look weak?

When National lied directly to the country’s face about the $11.7billion budget hole? Was that a good time to appreciate National aren’t constructive?

When National tricked them into believing they didn’t have the numbers to elect Trevor Mallard as Speaker simply by Simon Bridges having a puzzled look on his face? Was that a good time for Labour to appreciate National will deceive and manipulate to win?

When National forced Labour to give them more seats on select committees dooming any legislation to being roadblocked through the process, was that a good time to realise National are the danger?

Instead of championing the new Child Poverty law we are arguing about Jacinda’s offer of bipartisanship.

It’s time the new Government started getting a tad more ruthless and direct with its agenda and looking like winners rather than looking weak with all the bipartisanship virtue signalling.

Severe drought followed by severe rain fall followed by severe temperatures followed by a Tropical cyclone? That’s so many extreme weather events all in a row for NZ, it’s like ‘something’ is changing the climate or God is hugging the Earth extra tight

Seeing as climate change is a political issue and no longer a scientific one – TDB will name all cyclones hitting us this year after the MPs & Corporations who are feeding the climate denial – this one is Cyclone Fonterra.

The reason why there will be a dramatic jump in the support for radical green politics that go beyond the carbon neutral by 2030 empty gestures within the current political spectrum is because voters, after a while, are going to start staring out the window at weather patterns they know in their bones are different to the ones they have grown up with and those votes will ultimately revolt against the lack of preparation to adjust to the great cultural, economic and social adaptations we need to begin adopting.

The campaign had been launched a week earlier and sought to “call on Kiwis to show love for their rivers and lakes,” according to its inaugural press release.

Its Twitter account appeals to celebrities to share their favourite New Zealand swimming spot (Justin Bieber is one of many yet to respond). Its website features a large banner which reads “Rivers are good for you” and a cartoon mascot, a kōura, donning a snorkel.

A few days after crowning its song of the summer, the campaign hit the mainstream media when it released the results of a public survey declaring many New Zealanders were not swimming in rivers, primarily due to water temperature.

It light-heartedly concluded the nation had become “soft”; its press release appeared almost verbatim as news stories in several media outlets, repeating the line that Kiwis were not swimming in rivers, and that it was primarily because they were cold.

The sudden emergence of this campaign at a time of hyper-sensitivity around the politics of freshwater struck some as suspicious.

Swim Fresh, as it clearly states, was funded and conceived by Blackland PR, a crisis management and corporate consultancy that prides itself on influencing public perception of controversial issues that threaten a corporation’s reputation.

In its own words, on its website: “[W]e take arguments and evidence in your favour deep into the New Zealand public. We change hearts and minds, undermining those who threaten your business.” It says the most direct way to do that is through social media.

It has used those skills to try and build public support for oil and gas exploration, to advise food manufacturers on debates about obesity, and assist alcohol manufacturers in debates about public policy.

It has also advised the dairy industry on “influences of debates about water quality [and] environmental impact,” according to the corporate advocacy work listed on its website. One of the company’s clients is Dairy NZ.

Swim Fresh’s spokesman, Mark Blackham, is the PR company’s founder and a long-time lobbyist. The campaign is staffed by Massey University’s communication, journalism and marketing students.

The reason behind the campaign, Blackham says, was to show a different side to the water quality debate: one of positivity, in opposition to the “silly polarisation between good and evil”.

“We’ve heard about all the rivers that are not good, but we’re not necessarily hearing about the waterways that are okay,” he says.

…the Machiavellian thinking behind Swim Fresh is an important one for the Left and the Unions to appreciate if they have any hope of countering the Rights evolving attack styles.

Those polluting the water desperately need to shift the debate away from pollution because the sheer greed, outrageous abuse of the environment and simple science of it all crucifies the Dairy Intensive Farming Industry.

So rather than try and debate the issues, those polluters need to change the discussion all together by seeding bullshit apologist joke stuff about people not wanting to swim in Rivers, not because we fear being poisoned but because we have all gone a bit soft.

Because many news rooms are now staffed by cheap hipster Millenials with 1500 Twitter Followers, it’s easy to have this propaganda unquestioningly inserted into the news cycle.

The concept is to generate as many reasons as possible as to why people aren’t swimming in rivers that don’t include getting sick which immediately reminds everyone about Farmers polluting the water.

The issue is not that NZers are too soft to swim in cold river water, the issue is that the river might make you sick. Eliminating the reality means the debate doesn’t happen which is exactly what the water polluters want and that’s what a company like Blackland PR offers as a service.

The Left and the Unions don’t have a counter strike capacity to this kind of manipulation and that leaves them vulnerable as enormous amounts of money from the Right starts funding these groups.

So what does the Taxpayers’ Union and a naked Jordan Williams have to do with any of this?

One needs to appreciate that the Taxpayers’ Union is the new attack vehicle for the right. With Slater’s Whaleoil Blog robbed of any relevance or media attention after Dirty Politics, the right needed a new weapon to manipulate the media narrative with, but in a manner less radioactive than Slater.

Consider them the Holy Trinity of Right Wing arseholes, the Father (Farrar), the Son (Bishop) and the lowly boast (Williams).

The point of the organisation is to astroturf themselves into being considered a ‘union’ standing up for taxpayers when the reality is they attack Government agencies for private vested interests using the old stereotype of lazy slush fund drenched big Government narratives.

And what about that naked Jordan Williams? How does that unpleasant image tie into all of this?

That boast wasn’t for shits and giggles, it was the deeply held belief of the Right wing establishment. They all honestly believed that Winston was in it for the baubles and they could simply bribe him with offers.

What the Right did not appreciate about Winston, and what those helping run the back channels during the negotiations immediately understood about Winston, was that what he wanted, what he really, really, really wanted was to dismantle neoliberalism.

The shock wave on the Right caused by Winston wanting to change NZ went far further than Jordan’s bet to walk downtown Wellington naked (a bet he chickened out on in the end) and it’s gone full snarling grievance.

For the Right, this is a Government of trickery who conned the public. This isn’t a victory, it’s a theft and the deeply held resentment against the new Government can be seen in the manufactured drop in business confidence and the attempt to create another ‘winter of discontent’. It is important to understand this resentment and the genuine shock because that helps explain the viciousness with which National intend to employ to destroy the new Government.

So who is in the firing line as National marshal their attack dogs?

The rumour mill is running hot as to who National and their various House of Slytherin mercenaries will be targeting but here are the likely ones…

Equity NZ: The hammer will fall hardest here. For Key’s Government, the manufactured crisis at the Hobbit was a political and cultural gold mine. By manipulating NZers love of LOTR, the Government whipped up sentiment that the Union was threatening the making of the Hobbit film here. The anti-Union backlash was apocalyptic and not even Helen Kelly rushing to the defence of Jennifer Ward-Lealand could help in the end. By painting himself into a corner to gain a political victory over the Union movement and the wider Left, Key had to agree to giving Warner Bros more corporate welfare plus re-wrote employment law for the benefit of Corporate Hollywood. This time around National already has agents in the field whipping up the usual Weta workshop technical elites and will look to once again manufacture the collapse of a current film project and lay the blame at the feet of Labour for attempting to unpick the ridiculous labour law National put into effect. With Amazon announcing the new TV series of Lord of the Rings with New Line Cinema involved (they are a division of Warner Bros who made the film with Peter Jackson), the most likely attack line will be to suggest the TV series will be filmed here and use the attempted passing of the Hobbit Law to manufacture the supposed uncertainty. Expect to hear a lot of ‘Australian Union’ rhetoric and ‘greedy actor’ statements. If National can force Labour to walk away from the law or blame the new Government for the TV series going somewhere else (even if it was never going to be filmed here in the first place) it will be an enormous political victory that will perpetrate all the negative stereotypes about Labour in the thrall of the Unions. Expect to hear about the LOTR TV series possibly being filmed here a couple of weeks before the new Government starts to look at officially changing the law.

PPTA/NZEI: The public hate teachers and any time the Right can hold up a teacher who has assaulted or sexually harassed a student to make the point that being a ‘registered teacher’ meant nothing for the safety of the student, they will. This matters because only registered teachers can teach and what the Right wanted to do with Charter Schools was side step employing registered teachers so they could lower staffing costs. The money to back this reform is still there from the private education industry so expect any case of a teacher abusing a student to be magnified and amplified with brutal skill.

All public transport and Port Unions: National in opposition will push ahead with any campaign that has money backing it and that’s the explanation behind their inane roads every where campaign. National will want and will actively promote strikes in public transport or Ports because they want industrial action that creates wide spread disruption, especially if it grinds traffic to a halt. Expect to see a lot of public transport companies become incredibly unreasonable all of a sudden.

Public Service leaks: After 9 years in power, most public service is dominated by right wing goons who fully approve of the draconian welfare state created by National. As Labour attempt to change this culture of abuse, expect to see huge leaks highlighting the worst cases of welfare fraud and people who are difficult to find any sympathy for.

These are but a few of the targets the Right are gearing up to attack and exploit, so how do the Unions prepare for this?

I suggest throwing Stephanie Rodgers & Ruminator a bone.

For the record I’m being figurative and not literal here.

Both are failed Wellington political bloggers and both have gone off to form consultancies of their own but I’m not for one second actually suggesting that anyone in the Unions hire these two. I think they come from a generation who seem to believe any discussion in private can immediately be added to their live Twitter feed and before you know it you are suddenly on the bottom of a social media pile on for some heteronormative patriarchal sin (especially from Ruminator) but the reality remains that both of them have more talent in their tiny fingernails than most of the coms teams currently working at any Union in NZ.

The Generals of the Union movement need to seriously consider a small, well resourced (and most importantly outsourced) response team who can aid any Union getting attacked and immediately counter the smears the Right will indulge in or else risk getting out played by the Taxpayers’ Union and whatever astroturfed death squad the Right send in to attack the Union movement with.

Attacking a pregnant woman in a society that worships the cult of Motherhood would be a kamikaze approach and personalising the attack against Jacinda could back fire terribly in two ways.

The first is that it just looks like bullying and the vast majority of people will simply have their primordial reptile brain impulse to immediately defend a pregnant member of the tribe switch on and turn against the attacker with full frontal fury.

You lose when you attack a pregnant woman. Always.

The second more dangerous angle is that by attacking Jacinda, National opens the doorway to the criminally misogynistic hate vomit that has been sprayed around social media with the kind of carefree abandonment of a militantly malicious Tom cat over the last 24 hours.

Some of the comments on Kiwiblog and the Young Nats Facebook page are just fucking spectacular in their scumbaggery. I mean, I appreciate the spectrum of humanity is a wondrously broad and gloriously diverse rainbow, but fuck me some people seem to live in a reality that skipped the Renaissance, Enlightenment and basic Universal Human Rights.

…the Right are going to attack the new Government by going after those the public identify with Labour rather than attack a pregnant woman.

Could this strategy work? It certainly could.

The Left won the last election not because of tactics (the Labour Party were pretty much crap during the 6 week campaign) but because of strategy. Something no one acknowledges in Labour winning is that it was Matt McCarten’s strategy to beat National by actively going after National’s allies that won the Left the election. By knocking out Peter Dunne with Greg O’Connor and eliminating the Māori Party with Willie Jackson, National where left short of a majority in Parliament.

What we will see with National in Opposition is a similar approach, they won’t go after Jacinda directly, they will go after Labour’s identifiable allies to chip away at the new Government’s popularity by evoking Union bogeymen.

It took the Left 3 terms to work out how to beat a popular leader, it will take the Right less than 30seconds.

If the Union movement in NZ wants the new Government to get a second term, they need to urgently start planning a counter strike capacity they currently don’t have, and if the Union movement don’t like what I’m saying to them now, just imagine how much more unpleasant you’ll feel when I start the ‘I told you so’ blogs.

You have been warned.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/28/taxpayers-union-astroturf-jordan-williams-naked-and-how-national-attack-worker-rights-unions-in-2018-someone-throw-stephanie-rodgers-ruminator-a-bone/feed/17One Year of Trump – when will we start blaming the Democrats for this orange fascist?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/28/one-year-of-trump-when-will-we-start-blaming-the-democrats-for-this-orange-fascist/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/28/one-year-of-trump-when-will-we-start-blaming-the-democrats-for-this-orange-fascist/#commentsSun, 28 Jan 2018 00:54:27 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96448

Last week, the anniversary of the one year madness of King Trump came and went.

There was much snarling and rolling of eyes at the absurd level of scumbaggery and insult that this tiny handed orange fascist has managed to create in a mere 12 months. That he has proved to be so much worse than predicted and that he is nothing more than a distracted dog chasing every car he gets angry at is as terrifying a reality as the violent revenge fantasies he peddles to a white working class who have been left behind by globalisation.

It’s great to feel disgusted, terrified, angered, furious, pissed off, defiant, vindicated and belligerent about this horror clown’s first anniversary in power, but without understanding how this cancer was visited upon us, we are doomed to repeat this mistake.

Opponents of Trump like to point to the Russian interference in the election to explain Trump winning, but I think blaming Russia for ‘hacking’ the US Election is deeply counter productive.

Secondly, it allows the Democrats off the hook. Instead of acknowledging they ran a terrible candidate and fielded neoliberal policies that hurt the very workers they had simply assumed would vote for them, the Democrats can avoid scrutiny of their own rigged primary process, the manner in which Bernie Sanders was unfairly treated and their hollow policies by blaming it all on Russia.

Newsflash to the Democrats – Trump didn’t win because of Russia, he won because you failed to appreciate how your embrace of neoliberal globalisation hurt the very voters you needed the most.

One estimate puts the budget of Russian interference in the election via social media advertising at $250 000. With all due respect for American Democracy, if you can influence an election with a mere $250 000, you have way bigger problems than Putin.

We can scream racist and sexist as much as we like at Trump voters, but when Trump wooed Union families, women and the working poor in such huge numbers, something else needs to be examined as the reason this malignant tumour of a human being has been forced upon us all.

The free market globalisation that the Democrats embraced has robbed the domestic working classes of their dignity and economic ability to survive. Bernie Sanders understood this which is why he would have been able to woo those voters Trump needed back to the Democrats and beat Trump, but the vile corruption within the Democrats (who played to the elites within the Party) robbed Sanders of his nomination in a rigged system set up to prevent a populist left winger ever winning the candidacy.

By putting the Identity Politics of being the first Woman to win the Presidency over the economic needs of the poor, the Democrats handed the election to a snake oil merchant like Trump.

Refusing to acknowledge failed economic policy and corruption within the Democrats in allowing Trump to win makes the chances of him winning again more likely, not less likely.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/28/one-year-of-trump-when-will-we-start-blaming-the-democrats-for-this-orange-fascist/feed/75Why the vacant optimism of the ‘Humanity Star’ perfectly sums up the vanity of modern neoliberal NZhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/28/why-the-vacant-optimism-of-the-humanity-star-perfectly-sums-up-the-vanity-of-modern-neoliberal-nz/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/28/why-the-vacant-optimism-of-the-humanity-star-perfectly-sums-up-the-vanity-of-modern-neoliberal-nz/#commentsSat, 27 Jan 2018 20:44:07 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96450

Rocket Lab should have called their contemptibly named ‘Humanity Star’, ‘The John Key Orb’ .

The effluence with which Rocket Lab defend their grotesque advert in the sky is as toxic as it is gag-inducing…

“The whole point is to get people talking as a planet and I think we’ve achieved that. If you’re going to do something big some people will love it and some people won’t love it and it’s all about sparking the conversation.”

…what the fuck?

What conversation?

This conversation?

“Isn’t it fucking outrageous that a corporation shot an advert into the night sky that we are now all forced to see as it passes over in some type of Orwellian Marketing Horror story that will have McDonalds, Coke and fucking Apple all eyeing this up as an opportunity to start advertising in the last piece of unspoilt beauty we haven’t manage to shit on yet as a species’?

Is that the conversation we are having?

Here is how Rocket Lab are describing their tacky business card in the sky…

”The Humanity Star is a reminder to all on Earth about our fragile position in the universe. The project aims to draw people’s eyes up and encourage them to look past day-to-day issues and consider a bigger picture, including the role space will play in the future of our species,”

“We must come together as a species to solve the really big issues like climate change and resource shortages.”

…are you fucking kidding me?

This advert of yours is a semi-religious thought experiment is it?

You are a commercial operation, who blessed by geography, happen to have a super cheap means of shooting low cost satellites into orbital space. You are not a philosophical movement or ethical resource for humankind to help determine the momentum of our species.

This is like a MacDonald’s burger wrapper telling us that they exist to remind us of the human fucking condition.

The sheer audacity of this self-deceiving sophistry manages to sum up all the vacant aspiration and vanity of modern neoliberal New Zealand in a way that would make John Key (who best represented this cultural mutation), blush with lust.

The 30 year neoliberal economic revolution can only sustain its dominance through a crippling cultural mythology that robs citizens of solidarity and leaves them as competing individual consumers powerless with nothing but their wallet as a voice.

Under neoliberal culture, there is no hegemonic economic structure under which we are all slaves, oh no, there is only individual success and individual failure. If you ‘succeed’ then you have done this individually, and as such, have all the moral and ethical rights to do what you wish with that success.

Likewise if you ‘fail’, you do so all on your own with no one to blame but yourself.

This luck egalitarianism is why we have no issues in NZ treating beneficiaries with such contempt. Why we don’t blink at 10 000 in prison. Why we turn a blind eye to 40 000 homeless. Why we ignore 220 000 kids in poverty. Why a suicide rate almost double that of the road toll doesn’t mean much.

Each of these are just the market working by punishing those too helpless not to succeed. It’s economic darwinism.

We lie to ourselves about our clean green brand when the reality is that we allow the agricultural industry to pollute and steal vast amounts of water. We ignore the truth that our relative ‘clean’ environment is only that way because New Zealand was one of the last places white people colonised.

We cheer Team NZ and sneer at those homeless in cars.

We property speculate ourselves to false illusions of wealth and decry public spending on state housing.

We lose ourselves in the labyrinth of neoliberal identity politics while the richest 1% own almost 30% of everything.

We cheer Lord of the Rings while trashing worker rights.

We shoot a bloody business card into the sky and tell ourselves this individual success of a medium sized enterprise is actually a metaphorical Plato-esk intellectual lantern to light the future of humanity!

• Reinstatement will be restored as the primary remedy to unfair dismissal.

• Further protections for employees in the “vulnerable industries”

• Restoration of the duty to conclude bargaining unless there is a good reason not to.

• Removal of the MECA opt out where employers can refuse to bargain for a multi-employer collective agreement.

• Restoration of the 30-day rule where for the first 30 days new employees must be employed under terms consistent with the collective agreement.

• Repeal of partial strike pay deductions where employers can garnish wages for low-level industrial action. Employers have deducted pay for actions such as wearing t-shirts instead of uniforms.

• Restoration of union access without prior employer consent.

…the most important of these repeals is forcing bosses to stay at etc negotiating table. The new reforms the new Government are suggesting aren’t that huge…

• A requirement to include pay rates in collective agreements. This is based on recent case law. Pay rates may include pay ranges or methods of calculation.

• A requirement for employers to provide reasonable paid time for union delegates to represent other workers (for example in collective bargaining)

• A requirement for employers to pass on information about unions in the workplace to prospective employees along with a form for the employee to indicate whether they want to be a member.

• Greater protections against discrimination for union members.

…the right to fire law won’t be aimed at small business (who employ most of the people in this country) and the new reforms will make incremental change.

I think we are well passed incremental change.

I believe that no matter your role in society, be it doctor, dentist, nurse, rubbish collector, stay at home parent, beneficiary, prisoner, accountant, farmer, pensioner, bus driver, tow truck driver, taxi driver, politician, labourer, what ever it is, you are important. The fabric of society and community is woven together by everyone and everyone deserves a fair share of the harvest. If the rubbish collector stops the cities shut down in a month, if Doctors refuse to work people die, if lawyers weren’t around we wouldn’t know how much we hated lawyers, everyone has a role to play. We counter a status driven self absorbed culture by demanding workers get that dignity with progressive conditions. If we are serious about a Living Wage, tackling poverty in a genuine manner and ending welfare and beneficiary ‘dependancy’ we should fight for a worker levy and open Union membership.

I think every worker entering a new job should automatically be enrolled with the Union representing their sector. This open membership would cost a levy equivalent to two weeks union membership and workers could either chose to remain as members or if they don’t want to be a member for whatever reason, they can contact the Union and remove their membership.

They would still pay the levy. That is the cost of the standards and work safety conditions the Union has already negotiated prior to that worker entering the job, and as such is the price for having safe work environments with beneficial conditions.

Too many NZers are not coming home from work because they have been killed on the job. Pike River was a horror story and the Forestry sector continues to kill. The Labour Party in NZ birthed from the appalling work conditions in the Blackball Mine strike of 1908 because it’s always been work conditions that have driven unionism.

It is every working persons right to collectively bargain. The power structures of the boss enable them to constantly grind down labour costs leaving dead hard jobs with no conditions beyond the minimum. I say screw that. Life can be hard and barren enough without adding wage slavery to it. Open Unionism and a worker levy as I describe it here would generate a large increase of resource to the Unions and the automatic enrolment would immediately strengthen Union bargaining power. This real muscle will force poverty down by demanding better pay and strengthen worker rights.

Unions must demand more, the right to strike, a worker levy and open Union membership are ideas they need to build and push if the pathetic union membership rates are ever to be expanded and real inequality challenged.

David Fisher from the NZ Herald has added to my story TDB published earlier this week regarding the Human Rights Review Tribunal not having the funding to actually prosecute cases of abuse against the Police and State…

A tribunal set up to hear breaches of human rights has become so overworked and underfunded it can’t even schedule a phone conference to plan a hearing, according to an email sent by a staff member.

The amount of work handled by the Human Rights Review Tribunal has doubled over two years even though funding and staffing levels remain the same.

It has meant huge delays for those bringing complaints of discrimination, harassment and privacy breaches.

And for those who have brought cases, the Herald has learned of two that have had a three-year delay in having decisions delivered.

Associate Justice Minister Aupito William Sio told the Herald: “I am very conscious of the increase in workload being faced by the Human Rights Review Tribunal and have been briefed by the Ministry of Justice.”

He said there were two law changes heading for Parliament – both introduced when National was in power – but recognised more needed to be done.

“I am actively considering other ways to address the issues being faced by the tribunal”.

It can’t come soon enough for those who have taken complaints to the tribunal seeking prosecutions of those they claim had breached their rights.

Activist and blogger Martyn Bradbury said he was stunned to receive an email from a tribunal staff member telling him that it had no idea when his case against the police would progress.

He had been seeking a telephone conference with the tribunal and police to schedule the next steps in his case after police were found to have unlawfully accessed his data during the hunt for the Rawshark hacker.

The email sent to Bradbury stated: “The timing of a case management teleconference will depend entirely on the resources which the Government makes available to the tribunal.

“At the present time no accurate estimate can be given as to when a teleconference will be convened.”

Bradbury filed his case with the tribunal midway through last year after finding police had unlawfully accessed his banking information, citing “computer fraud”. The police inquiry appeared to have led to credit applications by Bradbury being handled and then rejected by the bank’s fraud unit.

Bradbury, who said he had nothing to do with the Rawshark hack, said the financial stress caused by the rejected application had huge mental health repercussions.

“The stress of all this, the sense of these ‘invisible hands’ moving against me, culminated in severe depression and self harm with two suicidal episodes at the end of 2016.”

He said the tribunal offered a chance to restore the damage done and the delay “gnaws away at you”.

“It is frustrating. This is the only avenue to hold police to account.”

Barrister Simon Judd, who takes prosecutions on behalf of the Director of Human Rights Proceedings before the tribunal, said the workload had led to delays which were frustrating.

“It can be very frustrating for the clients and they are waiting months or even years for a judgment. That’s pretty unacceptable.”

…the Human Rights Review Tribunal is the only mechanism open to citizens of NZ to hold the Police (and the State) to account for their abuses of power. The Independent Police Conduct Authority only has the power to recommend or suggest resolutions, the HRRT can force the Police to comply.

In my case, the Police have used huge loopholes to trawl the private information of thousands of NZers and put that taken information onto the NZ Police intelligence computer which is open to half a dozen other agencies without one warrant signed.

That we are in a situation where the only Tribunal in the land that can hold the Police and wider State to account is so underfunded that it can’t prosecute cases is an abomination to everything we should believe regardless of whether you are right wing or left wing.

I refuse point blank to allow the Police to get away with this level of mass surveillance abuse against me our my fellow New Zealanders.

UPDATE: The Associate Minister for Courts and Justice has reached out to me personally via Twitter with the following…

…I am meeting with MPs next week and will have an update on the latest after that.

This time it is activist and journalist Martyn Bradbury who has been drawn into the police investigation.

And this time police inquiries are said to have had an awful impact, leading to two suicidal episodes.

Bradbury’s is the latest case of police unlawfully exploiting the Privacy Act to get personal banking information without getting a court order.

It follows the revelation that Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager also had his banking records handed over to police without any legal compulsion to do so.

The practice has been ruled unlawful after Bradbury – who runs The Daily Blog website – complained to the Privacy Commissioner.

Bradbury told the NZ Herald he uncovered the police probe after being rejected for credit by his bank.

He said he became suspicious because the “extensions of credit weren’t extravagant and the manner in which the declines occurred just seemed odd”.

When Bradbury sought information through the Privacy Act, he discovered that detectives working on the Rawshark case had made a request for his records saying they were investigating “computer fraud”.

Detectives did so quoting a section of the Privacy Act allowing those holding data to ignore people’s privacy if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe it would help “maintenance of the law”.

The ruling from Privacy Commissioner John Edwards found police gave Bradbury’s bank no information to make an assessment of whether the request was “reasonable”.

Edwards rejected police submissions that the request only lacked supporting information for the bank to make a proper decision.

Even if police had provided the information, Edwards said detectives “were not justified” in asking for the banking records without a legal order from a judge.

“It is our view the request for your banking records, given their sensitivity, ought to have been placed before a judicial officer for decision on whether it met the grounds for a production order.”

He said the “nature and the scope of the request was unfair and unreasonably intrusive”.

The request for information was “unlawful” because it was constituted a “search” and the Bill of Rights stated “everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search”.

Bradbury, who insisted he has no connection to or knowledge of the hacking of Whaleoil blogger Cameron Slater’s computers, said: “They should have taken it to a judge and got a warrant.”

Instead, they sought “everything they could get their hands on”.

Bradbury will not name his bank as he intends taking further action.

But he said the bank’s refusal to give credit seemed contrary to staff assurances. His suspicions panned out when the Privacy Act request to police showed his banking records had been sought.

He found police had labelled the request for his banking records as connected to “computer fraud” and his credit requests – just a few months later – were being handled by the bank’s internal fraud department.

Bradbury said the credit requests were to help keep The Daily Blog going and getting knocked back triggered a huge depressive episode.

He said he had lived with depression since suffering a brain injury aged 18 from a car accident.

“Over the last five years that depression has become very difficult to manage and the financial stress of not extending credit all combined in late 2016 in two suicidal episodes.

“When your little black dog morphs and mutates into a huge black bear, you’re looking for anything that will ease the anguish and pain.”

Felix Geiringer, the barrister who acted for Hager overturning the police search warrant, said it was hard to understand any “credible basis” for including Bradbury in the Rawshark inquiry.

He said police appeared to have sought Bradbury’s records to try and establish the hacker was paid to carry out the hack. “There’s no evidence that took place in this case. There’s none.”

Geiringer said Bradbury – like Hager – was a journalist which conveyed specific protections around searches.

It was the same issue which the High Court rapped police in the Hager case, he said.

The NZ Herald has previously shown how police have used the Privacy Act exploit to gain banking details of potentially thousands of people without any court or judicial order – and that at least one bank has used it to red-flag customers.

The practice was widespread when the NZ Herald exposed it in 2013 and saw police headquarters offer assurances that it would not be used to access detailed banking records.

Yet police continued to use the exploit, not only in the Rawshark investigation against Nicky Hager, but in cases identified across the country.

Police told the Herald that the Rawshark inquiry remained an “open” file although no officers are currently assigned to the investigation.

A spokesman for police said the request for bank records was in line with a “Letter of Agreement” between police and the NZ Bankers’ Association.

“Police note that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner agreed that Police had a lawful purpose for collecting the information but that based on the level of sensitivity of the information, a court order was the only method that should have been used to request this.”

The spokesman said police wanted to speak with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner “regarding its view on requesting information”.

The NZ Bankers’ Association did not answer questions about the practice, even though it has acknowledged previously its members have an obligation to protect members’ information.

Among the questions it did not answer was whether the banking community had ever checked to see how many customers of banks have had their information provided unlawfully to police.

In a statement, NZBA chief executive Karen Scott-Howman said: “Banks assess all information requests on a case by case basis.

“They only provide information to the Police when they receive a production order that legally requires them to provide information or when the request complies with the Privacy Act.”

…As was detailed last year, the Privacy Commissioner of NZ investigated my case and found that not only did the NZ Police breach my privacy by gaining access to my banking data during their failed witch hunt of an investigation against Nicky Hager, but the Privacy Commissioner also found that the NZ Police had breached my civil rights through unlawful search.

We have been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for a time for the Human Rights Review Tribunal to actually pick up the Privacy Commissioners report and begin the process of holding the NZ Police to account for their breach of my privacy and civil rights.

Today after being told last year that a decision would be forthcoming early this year, the Human Rights Review Tribunal has gotten back in touch with me to inform me that due to a lack of funding, the HRRT can’t give any idea as to when my case against the NZ Police can begin.

If the NZ Police can get away with taking personal information from a political blogger that breaches the privacy act and my civil rights, they can do it to anyone and the supposed watchdogs that are there to protect us are so underfunded they’ve become lap dogs to police abuse of power.

The financial and emotional cost of taking on the NZ Police via an underfunded watchdog that can’t even budget to hold them to account is immense and difficult.

UPDATE: The Associate Minister for Courts and Justice has reached out to me personally via Twitter with the following…

…I am meeting with MPs next week and will have an update on the latest after that.

It’s been more than a decade since Malcolm Barnett’s stepdaughter was killed in a road crash by a meth-fuelled driver.

Yet the Taupo man believed police were still not equipped to get drug-impaired drivers off the country’s roads.

He was supporting a new member’s bill which would give officers the ability to conduct roadside saliva tests for cannabis, MDMA and methamphetamine, but said it had taken far too long for preventative steps to be taken.

“Stop dicking around. They [the government] talk about trying to make our roads safer and all the rest of it. Part of the way to make our roads safer is to get these people off the road.”

In September 2005, Krystal Bennett, 18, was driving home when disqualified driver Leah Wai Peneha drove 300 metres down the wrong side of River Rd, Upper Hutt, and into her car while high on P.

The fatal head-on crash saw Peneha convicted of the teenager’s manslaughter, but Barnett was still adamant roadside saliva testing could have prevented the teenager’s death.

After years of campaigning, Barnett has renewed his call for the government to give police the tools to drug test drivers.

“If legislation can only be done at Parliament level, then get something done … give police the power to do it.

“This is not going to save our daughter, but if we can save some other poor bastard going through what we’ve had to, then that’s got to be a bonus,” Barnett said.

National’s Wairarapa MP Alastair Scott’s member bill would allow police to carry out saliva testing when a driver was suspected of being drug-impaired.

He planned to put the Land Transport (Random Oral Fluid Testing) Amendment Bill into the ballot by Tuesday next week.

…ot takes almost half of this story wallowing in victim porn before it even tells you want this story is actually about.

While every lose of life is a tragedy, I’m not sure what the hell the relevance of dredging up a road death over a decade old is other than to generate manufactured anger.

380 people died last year on the roads while 606 committed suicide last year. Thousands more died because of booze and tobacco so to start demanding specific legislation for drug driving because of one death a decade ago seems extravagant in the extreme.

Here’s the problem. With cannabis being our most used illegal drug in NZ, this test will pick up thousands of drivers who might have cannabis in their system but no driving impairment. That means thousands more clogging our judicial system and thousands being punished for testing positive to a drug test that doesn’t actually show if the person is impaired while driving.

Giving the police more powers to solve a problem looking for a solution is the worst kind of social policy.

To be effective the test would need to create an impairment level for cannabis, but I don’t think the National Party are even capable of understanding the nuance.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/23/the-problem-with-nationals-drug-driving-law-and-the-complicity-of-fairfax-media-to-fan-victim-porn/feed/7Cough-cough. Look I appreciate the country has baby brain, but what about that housing affordability and inequality eh?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/23/cough-cough-look-i-appreciate-the-country-has-baby-brain-but-what-about-that-housing-affordability-and-inequality-eh/
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Forget the idea that new Mums have ‘baby brain’, I think the country has baby brain.

I’m not talking about the roars of dinosaurs who don’t comprehend that they are extinct yet brain farting out crude stereotypes of how women shouldn’t wear hemlines above their ankles or be pregnant while in charge of the country, I’m talking about the bizarre cultural gag reflex that has kicked into place with a frightening familiarity of those wishing to maximise the cultural symbolism of the pregnancy of an unwed woman to a stay at home Dad that has erupted like small pox on social media.

Jacinda has babysat my daughter and I know Clarke from when we worked together on Channel Z as DJs in the late 1990s. I’d say proximity wise I’m far closer to the both of them than the majority of those on Twitter, yet not even I would dare to feel like I have the prerogative, audacity or arrogance to advice them on parenthood or suddenly start knitting booties for them!

The creepy way everyone has suddenly involved themselves in this pregnancy is proof positive of the weird cult of Motherhood which straightjackets so many women and ultimately mutates their own self worth with a hyper harsh judgmental criticism is in full effect and suddenly everyone feels like they have a right to be part of this very private and personal moment.

Ugh.

Fatherhood is in now way worshipped with the same frenzied evangelical gushing that has swamped social media recently and while all this hyper emotional gushing would normally just be a bit of harmless fun, there is a danger.

The danger is that our devotion to the cult of Motherhood blinds us to the far more important and far more pressing issues that we demanded this new Government fix.

The latest housing affordability stats are a depressing reminder that even while the market ‘cools’ and that it’s a ‘buyers market’ (let me pause writing until I stop laughing uncontrollably at the idea a million dollar trash dump is being described as a ‘buyers market’) more and more NZers are being locked out of home ownership.

Growing inequality and housing affordability are more important than a single baby and we’ve already seen policy that was supposed to start fixing these issues have had their numbers overcooked and in the case of the $50 a week student allowance, actually become counter productive!

I’m not negging on babies or new mums, but Jesus Christ folks, let’s put the cult of Motherhood to one side and keep focusing on the things that matter. Knit the booties if you must, but let’s not pretend those booties are anything more than a diversion to far bigger issues.

It’s not about Jacinda and Clarke’s baby, it’s about every baby being born.

Their brutal assault on the new Government last year set perfectly the narrative that Labour is out of its depth. The humiliating concessions pulled out of a hapless Chris Hipkins by a ruthless Simon Bridges will slow and hamper the legislative process in a torturous fashion.

The line of attack in the new year was going to be relentlessly about Jacinda’s inexperience with specific focus on the usual hick ups an incoming Government stumbles with.

According to sources who have spoken with people inside that space however, Jacinda’s pregnancy throws all of that up into the air.

Attacking a pregnant woman in a society that worships the cult of Motherhood would be a kamikaze approach and personalising the attack against Jacinda could back fire terribly in two ways.

The first is that it just looks like bullying and the vast majority of people will simply have their primordial reptile brain impulse to immediately defend a pregnant member of the tribe switch on and turn against the attacker with full frontal fury.

You lose when you attack a pregnant woman. Always.

The second more dangerous angle is that by attacking Jacinda, National opens the doorway to the criminally misogynistic hate vomit that has been sprayed around social media with the kind of carefree abandonment of a militantly malicious Tom cat over the last 24 hours.

Some of the comments on Kiwiblog and the Young Nats Facebook page are just fucking spectacular in their scumbaggery. I mean, I appreciate the spectrum of humanity is a wondrously broad and gloriously diverse rainbow, but fuck me some people seem to live in a reality that skipped the Renaissance, Enlightenment and basic Universal Human Rights.

The amount off WTF moments I’ve had since Jacinda and Clarke announced their symbolically modern generational shifting news has surprised me.

I mean, like.

What. The. Fuck?

This was quickly deleted. Like so many others.

Never before have I seen so many hot takes quickly scrubbed clean.

If National feed an attack on Jacinda they are going to unleash all the worst angels of their nature. From conspiracy theories to outright burn-witches-at-the-stake level sexism, focusing on Jacinda is a dangerously risky line that is doomed to failure.

This means National’s next line of attack, the Unions, must reap them a larger harvest because attacking Jacinda is simply off the cards unless National are serious about regressing as a modern political party that would put them socially in the early 1900s.

In my next blog, How & why National attack worker rights & unions in 2018 (someone throw Stephanie Rodgers & Ruminator a bone), I’lllook at how National will target the Unions and what the Unions and new Government need to do to inoculate themselves from it.

Images and recordings are used to monitor bycatch of dolphins, seabirds, sea lions and penguins – which are threatened by fisheries – as well as illegal fish dumping

Representatives from the fishing industry wrote to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) in July 2017 to ask that that material be exempt from the Official Information Act (OIA).

…if the industry doesn’t want to be targeted by environmentalists, then stop desecrating the environment!

Censoring the images will only allow the industry to hide their damage and never be held accountable. It’s a message to them the MPI is focused on sustainability and not bowing to the never ending demands of the industry.

The Senate vote tightened in the evening hours, as the Senate’s privacy hawks worked to drum up support for further debate around the surveillance bill, opening the door for amendments that could limit the government’s ability to use the loophole to surveil American citizens without first obtaining a warrant. Unfortunately for privacy reformers and anti-surveillance lawmakers, the Senate just voted to close that door, moving a bill forward to extend Section 702 surveillance for six more years. A full vote on the bill, which is widely expected to pass, could happen as soon as mid-week.

Effectively it allows the NSA to use key words for mass surveillance of all communications and it allows for warrantless spying on US citizens.

It shreds any pretence of privacy and gives vast powers to the FBI who would under this legislation be able to search any NSA database without a warrant.

Democrats helped the NSA gain this victory as well…

It is an enormous blow to civil liberties and cements vast unchecked powers to the Deep State. With NZ reliant upon America for it’s own 5 Eyes mass surveillance powers, it is entirely possible and probable that NZ communications would be included in this wide spread net.

BEIJING/HONG KONG, Jan 16 (Reuters) – China’s Dagong Global Credit Rating Co, one of the country’s major ratings firms, cut the sovereign ratings of the United States to BBB+ from A-, saying the tax reductions announced last month weakened Washington’s ability to repay debt.

The ratings, which are now level with those of Peru, Colombia and Turkmenistan on the Beijing-based agency’s scale of creditworthiness, have also been put on a negative outlook.

In a statement on Tuesday, Dagong warned that the United States’ increasing reliance on debt to drive development would erode its solvency. It made specific reference to President Donald Trump’s tax package, which is estimated to add $1.4 trillion over a decade to the $20 trillion national debt burden.

“Deficiencies in the current U.S. political ecology make it difficult for the efficient administration of the federal government, so the national economic development derails from the right track,” Dagong said.

Officials in Beijing are seething after the US blocked Ant Financial’s purchase of MoneyGram, and pressured AT&T into abandoning a deal to sell Huawei’s Mate 10 smartphone in the US over espionage concerns.

Twin inquiries by the US Commerce Department could open the way for punitive measures against Chinese steel and aluminium shipments on national security grounds, while a highly-sensitive probe into intellectual property theft and cyber-espionage will deliver its findings on Thursday (US time).

…by threatening a downgrade of US credit, China have openly threatened America to do anything with their inquiries into Chinese aluminium dumping and cyber-spying.

Against a reasoned opponent such threats would be enough to ensure economic self-preserverance, against Trump it could just provoke him into going well beyond any WTO mechanisms for trade disputes and unilaterally respond against China.

This at a time when the US markets are going beyond euphoric into kool aid territory and the real economy in China has slumped to 5% growth.

An over confident America and a China desperate to project external enemies for national solidarity and order are the ingredients for the Sino-US Pacific cold war to go hot.

Markets have gone beyond euphoric and have now entered their drugged up kool aid cult phase.

The stratospheric asset markets pumped up by quantitate easing to try and fight off the 2007-2008 global financial recession are all starting to shake and shudder under the enormous weight of debt created wealth the current economic system must now try and carry.

In the normal rhythm of Capitalism we would have had our boom bust cycle, but because the last bust would have been so destructive, the system allowed the same reckless corporate greed to overtake providence and the elites are once again gambling with everyones livelihoods.

The trade tensions come at a delicate juncture just as the two great economies start to diverge. A blast of fiscal stimulus at the top of the cycle is pushing the US towards an overheating boom, while China is clearly slowing as fiscal spending cools and credit curbs bite deeper.

This combination is toxic for trade equilibrium. China’s trade surplus with the US rose 10 per cent to a record US$276 billion ($380b) last year even before this development. It is almost certain to jump further this year as US consumers suck in imports.

China launched a massive fiscal and credit expansion in 2016 and 2017 designed to prime pump the economy before the coronation of Xi Jinping at the Communist Party Conference last autumn. What is unclear is whether it will slow gently this year, or whether a deeper downturn is coming.

Imports of crude oil, copper, and iron ore fell by 12 per cent, 7 per cent, and 11 per cent in December, beyond what can be explained by season effects. The war on pollution is leading to closures of heavy industrial plants.

China’s M2 money supply growth fell to a modern-era low of 8.2 per cent in December. New credit halved to US$90b as the authorities cracked down on shadow banking and forced lenders to deleverage, squeezing the private sector.

Capital Economics says its proxy gauge of economic output – unlike the “smoothed” official figures – has dropped to a growth rate of around 5 per cent.

…people are going to want a State that will be prepared to step up to the challenge and lead rather than leave it to the free market.

A hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/16/all-the-canaries-in-the-minefield-are-dead-the-looming-economic-correction/feed/7Glitterboobs, tinned tomatoes, racist menus and golliwogs – have we started the year off angry?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/15/glitterboobs-tinned-tomatoes-racist-menus-and-golliwogs-have-we-started-the-year-off-angry/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/15/glitterboobs-tinned-tomatoes-racist-menus-and-golliwogs-have-we-started-the-year-off-angry/#commentsMon, 15 Jan 2018 05:38:18 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=96100I tend to want to follow politics, economics and the political process because with an untested left wing Government, a looming economic crash and an orange fuckwit on the nuclear button, the shit storm that is about to hit demands our full attention.

But sometimes things happen and people say things that are so ugly and ignorant you need to pause and just say, ‘Oi. You. No!’

Have we started the year in an ugly and angry way? I think we have and I think some of the ugliness in our dialogue has been fuel injected by social media platforms where vilification and maximum emotional outrage have rendered us too fried and bitter to even bother checking the better angels of our nature’s twitter feed.

At the beginning of last year I rolled my eyes over the story about a young Māori woman taking offence at the Mad Butcher allegedly claiming that Waiheke Island was a ‘white man’s island’. I say allegedly because he claims to have said something different and I felt it was a storm in a teacup.

I thought casual racism was a pretty middle class concern and the least of our worries and focus when real racism was so prevalent and present.

I was wrong to think it didn’t matter.

It did and it does.

I’m still not sure about the quality of that debate and I think calling each other racists is the easiest way to negatively polarise but the debate was necessary from the point of view of trying to draw a line in the sand on offending each other.

I look at the four issues that have recently erupted on social media and some of the things I see people saying is woefully stupid and just misplaced fear and anger that is being spouted by wounded and insecure individuals.

For the record.

If a woman is walking naked in public, you don’t have any right whatsoever to touch her. Yes, self-defence law doesn’t cover her chasing the dickhead who did this down and hitting him four times in the head, but that’s a side salad to the initial issue of him sexually assaulting her in public in the first place. There’s no defence in the world where it’s justifiable to grope her. None. Zip. Why the Christ are you still trying to justify that? It’s like drink driving in that sure you can do it, but it’s illegal and you are putting others in danger. It’s a none negotiable. There’s no wriggle room here, so don’t do it. If you are feeling guilty about times you yourself have sexually assaulted someone, take this moment to not project what you want to define it as to clear your conscience and take it as an opportunity to pledge to never hurt and insult someone like this ever again.

If you are getting indignant about being told what food to donate to women who are escaping domestic violence, perhaps you need to appreciate that charity isn’t pretty. It’s ugly and real. If you are offended that women in a state of shock from domestic violence require comfort food as opposed to a Jamie Oliver ingredient list, then perhaps you need to check who this charity is actually for, you or the person you are donating it to.

If you think racist menus are funny because they make fun of the way people speak, it not only demeans the food you are cooking, it demeans you as a person. The needlessness of the spite and the joy in revelling in the ‘naughtiness’ of being politically incorrect speaks to a pretty base level ignorance that is childish and beneath everyone. How can an asian restaurant do justice to the spirit of the kai when that restaurant is mocking and humiliating the culture that kai comes from?

(If your main concern was me throwing in the word ‘kai’ in that last sentence, you’re either someone who thinks this menu is hilarious or Don Brash.)

I appreciate you might have had a Golliwog when you were a kid. I appreciate you cuddled up to the Golliwog and I appreciate that you aren’t racist. I get that. However the Golliwog is a crass caricature of the very racist Black and White Minstrels and just like the n word, it’s not really something white people get to claim. And yes, unfortunately sensitivities to many centuries of slavery and racism do in fact outrank your childhood memories.

In each of these four examples, the Glitterboobs, tinned tomatoes, racist menus and golliwogs, people are wanting to be wilfully offensive to one another. It’s not a case of ‘forgive me I didn’t realise that’, it’s a case of, “Fuck you I don’t care”.

Perhaps it’s because the first reaction is always, ‘you racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/xenophobic heteronormative patriarchal redneck…’ that people’s heels dig in as deeply as they do. Social media has bypassed gatekeeper media, but it’s also unleashed a cacophony of resentment that removes compassion in favour of online assassinations.

I was wondering about this when I was in Whangarei over the weekend at the Direct Animal Action Rodeo protest.

Rural folk feel under attack. Many are in debt up to their eye balls from dairy intensification, the suicide rate is soaring and when you are economically stressed out, hyper sensitive and thin skinned to criticism, being told to end any event you culturally identify with provokes resentment.

For them Rodeo is a cultural ritual and attempting to remove it as they struggle cuts deeply.

Direct Animal Action’s code of conduct is for silent protests so as to not antagonise those attending and it’s this respectful protest that has made Direct Animal Action’s campaign against Rodeos so successful.

The ugly anger being spouted by many on social issues that cut to the very heart of our individual identities is a backlash long in coming. The wounds that so many are speaking from can’t be argued with, they need to heal first before they can listen and I don’t think there is going to be a lot of listening in 2018.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/15/glitterboobs-tinned-tomatoes-racist-menus-and-golliwogs-have-we-started-the-year-off-angry/feed/27So for 38 minutes the people of Hawaii knew what it felt like to live in Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen & other places US + allies bombhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/15/so-for-38-minutes-the-people-of-hawaii-knew-what-it-felt-like-to-live-in-palestine-afghanistan-syria-yemen-other-places-us-allies-bomb/
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Except for of course that the people we bomb in those countries don’t generally get a text alert that we are about to blow them up.

How this message got sent, what happened when the White House was informed, (was the White House informed or were they too frightened to tell Trump?) and could these systems be hacked to exploit and frighten large populations are all questions to be answered, but our Western Privilege desperately needs to be challenged here. Images of terrified people running in Hawaii should be a reminder of all those who never get warnings when American bombs rain down.

One of the things dear to Jim’s heart was the idea that the State should use its power to make good outcomes and not leave it to the free market. In that vein, here are some upgrades for 2018 that we should push from a progressive Government.

Universal Suffrage – lower the voting age to 16:

If we want to re-engage youth, we have to actively promote their rights. By including 16 year olds into the democratic franchise, we allow their concerns, especially towards global warming, to be forced onto the political agenda. This would generate a better quality of democratic outcome that weights the realities of todays generation with the vested interests of the landed gentry who always vote. This should be picked up immediately by the Ministry of Youth and championed.

50-50 Gender Boards in all Public Services:

If one of the main criticisms from CEOs and the corporate world is that there aren’t enough quality female candidates for Board positions, then generate the infrastructure to lift that by setting all Public boards 50-50. There is a reservoir of talent inside the Public Service of women who have not been able to advance as far as they should have and who are ready to step up immediately. By lifting all Boards to 50-50 gender ratios inside the Public Service, you immediately upskill and prepare a new generation of female leaders who can move from the public service with Boardroom experience into the private sector to help boost the share of executive power in the private sector as well..

0800 public servant whistleblower phone number:

Where public servants who feel managers or ministerial bosses aren’t implementing new Government policy or are implementing policy that is counter productive to the public, can contact the Labour Party or the Minister or the PSA directly and alert the new Government to how policy is actually being implemented. For 9 years National have indoctrinated these Ministries into weapons against poor people, not for their welfare. They are fiefdoms of neoliberal public policy and those few still in the public service who are burnt out from fighting fires on every front need a boost by this type of gesture so that there is hope that the horror of the last 3 terms can be reversed. It would also give the new Ministers a better way to deal with the Yes Minister Public Servants who are already starting to smother them.

Make this a priority investment into digital infrastructure and re-invigorating Public Libraries and Marae while bolstering rural connectivity and countering lower socio-economic digital divide.

Upper Chamber of Parliament:

NZ is a one chamber Parliament and with the use of urgency, any crazy old thing can be written into law within a couple of hours making our Parliament one of the most powerful in the world. If we are to respect the Treaty as a founding document that should be celebrated as a strength rather than derided as reverse-racism run amok and if we want to make longer term vision from our politics, I think a 50 seat second chamber above Parliament with a 5 year term that has the power to delay legislation that breaches the Treaty or negatively impacts the future. The Tino Rangatiratanga Chamber would have the power to hear who legislation falls under their mandate and if a majority decide it is, then legislation could be passed back down to the Parliament for a re-vote. This would create break peddles for radical policy lurches and avoid captured policy dictates from vested interests.

New Union strike powers and two week worker levy:

If we ar serious about reversing inequality, the rules around strikes need to be urgently rewritten to make strike action by workers far easier. It is only when Unions have actual muscle at the negotiating table that bosses ever bother listening. The current legislation around strikes makes it very difficult for a Union to call one, allowing greater flexibility for Unions to call bosses out with strikes will force employers to want to compromise.

Living Wage:

This must be seen as the standard now and not the aspiration.

Free Public Transport for everyone under 18, students, disabled and beneficiaries:

Let’s extend the Public Transport system to help move the poorest and most disadvantaged amongst us around our cities. Pubic Transport can’t be allowed to gentrify, we need it to help counter inequality while promoting more public transport use.

New way for student loans to be worked off:

The horror of our student loan mountain has to be looked at with innovative new ideas to help pay off the generation of debt that has been built up.

Volunteers allowance:

Help community groups pay for volunteers and help young people gain skills while strengthening the threads of community.

All woman political panel show on mainstream TV:

Come on. COME ON.

Vice Tax:

Put a super tax on the profits of tobacco, alcohol and gambling and put that money back into regulation and support services for those damaged by those vices.

Regulated Cannabis Market:

Come on. COME ON!

Beneficiary debt:

The viciousness of MSDa in their prosecution of the poor must be ended and the mountain of debt established written off.

Free Yoga, meditation, music, art, drama and literacy classes in all prisons available to all prisoners:

Could do more to generate positive results from our Corrections system than anything else.

Remove GST from fruit and vege:

The state has an obligation to set the market in a way that favours the people, removing GST makes fruit and vegetables cheaper at a time when we substantially need more fruit and veggies in our diet.

Remove GST from condoms, tampons and birth control

We want to support positive sexual health and remove price barriers to contraceptives while acknowledging that tampons are a necessity that should be as cheap as possible. Removing GST recognises the power imbalances that make these necessities worthy of subsidising.

Offer small and medium businesses much lower penalty rates and offer amnesties:

While helping out workers, the new Government (particularly the Greens) should be reaching out to small and medium sized business with a reform on IRD to make their sanctions less punitive towards them.

NZ domestic produce subsidy:

Why should NZers pay the world market price for food produced in NZ? When you consider the market protections created for dairy, meat and agriculture alongside the environmental damage we all share from their production, shouldn’t NZers have a built in local subsidy that recognises the market protections and environmental cost? Shouldn’t NZers be able to purchase domestic produce at a domestic price rather than competing with the price a global market with global demand can create?

Free vegetarian school lunches:

Eliminates hunger at schools, promotes healthy diet, moves away from meat because meat is so damaging to the environment.

Free Counselling:

The enormity of depression upon our society is only beginning to be understood. It is apparent we have a culture in need of counselling. We need to provide a public service of counsellors who are free and promote going as part of a necessary healthy lifestyle.

The first is that National will champion issues that have big financial backers. The Roading Industry is one of the most powerful lobby groups in NZ and over their 9 years of power, National effectively wrote policy for them and not for NZs wider interests, so National’s campaigns will be aligned with corporate interests to ensure there is money to pay for the campaign.

The second thing we can see is National will attempt to pretend they aren’t championing corporate interests by selling this as democratic participation. This will be an important feature of National in opposition, they intend to bog down any select committee process by driving up partisan public participation and then demanding all that partisan participation is heard. National will mask their filibustering of legislation as champions of the democratic process and will milk that for all its worth.

The third thing their road lust petition campaign shows us is that National will target the core values of the new Government as a weakness. Collins spends all her time announcing this petition plan by consistently driving home the attack talking point of roads not being built for wimpy public transport projects.

This final insight is the most important reminder of National’s grand strategy behind their tactics, which is to sell all policy as a culture war. Public transport is left and progressive, National will target that and force it into a culture war setting so as to woo the disgruntled middle while ignoring the wider debate as to why we need public transport in the first place.

One of the great Totara’s in our forest has fallen and we must not allow the mainstream media to sterilise Jim’s legacy. I doubt any of the kids currently running the news rooms had any idea who the hell Jim Anderton was let alone his fight against neoliberalism, they just saw his name trending on twitter so jumped on board.

Jim’s legacy goes deeper than Kiwibank, paid parental leave and free doctors visits for children, he believed passionately that the State had an obligation to its people and that abdicating that responsibility to the free market was immoral.

This truth in Jim’s fight against neoliberalism is the key to Jim’s legacy and we must not allow the corporate mainstream media to scrub Jim of his truth.

Jim believed that it was the economic system we are all enslaved by that created solidarity, not identity politics. The 30 year neoliberal experiment which has mutilated and mutated our society, economy and culture was an obscenity that Jim refused to acquiesce to, this is what we who dance in the shadow of the next economic collapse with an environment in its death throws need to grasp.

The State must be far more interventionist in providing the universal services and building blocks of society and community and the only politician currently pushing that argument is Winston Peters because he is old enough to remember a NZ before the neoliberal experiment.

If we want to honour Jim, the new Government should immediately pass legislation to make dental care free for children and teenagers, if we want to see Jim’s vision survive, we must all demand the new Government lives up to its obligations and not subcontract them out to the free market.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/09/jims-legacy-what-can-we-learn-from-his-vision-now/feed/4How sick that one of the best environmental scientists can be punished this way in NZ?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/09/how-sick-that-one-of-the-best-environmental-scientists-can-be-punished-this-way-in-nz/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/09/how-sick-that-one-of-the-best-environmental-scientists-can-be-punished-this-way-in-nz/#commentsMon, 08 Jan 2018 19:56:05 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95966

A scientist like Mike Joy who has had the courage to challenge the corporate farming pollution of our water doesn’t deserve to be defamed and attacked in this manner, especially when it’s by an industry shill like Edmeades.

This is nothing short of a character assassination and a reminder that Fairfax is there for corporate interests. The Dairy Industry has gone from being an abuser of our environment into being an abuser of science, we just can’t let these sanctimonious pricks get away with this and environmentalists like Joy need to know we have their back.

Death is not the end for receiving a New Zealand pension, with some receiving payments after a month in the grave.

The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has continued to pay veterans’ pensions or superannuation payments to almost 7000 people for a month or more after their death during the past five years.

The figures – requested under the Official Information Act in 2015 then released more than two years later – show the number of post-death payments is increasing due to the rising number of New Zealand pensioners.

According to Mary Sewell, from MSD, Work and Income received death notifications from the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA).

If MSD catch any beneficiary in a relationship by spying on social media accounts or accidentally overpay a beneficiary it is fraud, it has immediate penalties added to it and there is interest added on top of the penalty.

MSD infamously chased a woman who should never have been in debt through the Courts for 12 years because they said the beneficiary might win Lotto one day.

But when it’s super payments or veterans’ pensions that are over paid, MSD has a completely different view of compassion and decency.

It’s not that I want this compassion to be removed from the elderly or the veterans, I just wish that the same empathy could be extended to the beneficiaries whose lives they make miserable.

Why can’t we have both rather than spite for one group and sympathy for another?

There were many things that happened in 2017, but the most dangerous amongst them was the culture of festering resentment that eclipsed the better angels of our nature.

Globally, the working classes of America conspired in 2016 to send a wrecking ball into a political system they no longer believed in to go up against neoliberal economics that had failed them through globalisation.

And what a wrecking ball Trump has become.

Aside from the rampant racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-intellectualism and hatred for anyone poor, liberal media despise Trump because deep down in places they never like to admit at their plush dinner parties, Trump truly represents what America is.

A shallow narcissist culture looking for its next selfish ego stroke paranoidly armed to the teeth with enough corporate weapons to destroy the planet many times over

That’s fine when you are the host of a reality TV show, it’s terrifying when that person leads a nuclear armed country.

Trump is the ultimate resentment politician. He understands how it feels to be looked down upon by his peers who have laughed at his achievements. His overcompensation resonates with every white working poor American who have perceived their culture and their values belittled for cosmopolitan pretensions while economically robbing them of any resilience.

Trump’s revenge fantasies against every imagined slight ignites those voters own resentments while also becoming a flare to attract white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers.

How can this still attract 30% support? Because resentment has a long memory and it can’t be forgotten by those on the economic edge.

So where will the Trump resentment end?

We keep wanting to believe Trump will be impeached, but for his followers, any attempt at that will be the final proof they need that the system is rigged against them and their choice for President. The Republicans themselves are held hostage to his popular support amongst their voter base and Democrats have allowed the so called Russian hacking of their democracy to let them off the hook for appointing a candidate as flawed as Clinton via a system that was rigged against Bernie Sanders.

If Russia could really hack the American election with less than $250 000 through Facebook adverts, I’d suggest their democracy has far bigger problems than Putin.

The reality is Trump will probably launch some military conflict somewhere and wait for Republican voters to rally around the flag making criticism seem unpatriotic at a time of war. Believing he won’t win a second term is just hope, it’s not based in reality.

America’s mutilated public education system ensures the resentful will hold power, not the enlightened.

It wasn’t just politically that resentment kulture ruled, it was socially.

Resentment fuelled the millions of women who for centuries had no recourse to the sexual harassment they contend with daily to suddenly be free of gatekeeper media and name any harasser they wished.

Men responded by being targeted without due process with an even larger ocean of resentment. Some men claimed this was a ‘witch hunt’ when of course what was happening was far more dangerous to men than that. What happened was a witch trial, just like Salem, where the evidential threshold minus due process was whittled down to simply making the accusation on social media. Under current feminist dogma, anyone making an accusation must be believed and any attempt to challenge an accusation is akin to being an abuser yourself.

White CIS people felt resentful about privilege they had never perceived before, men felt resentful about a toxic masculinity that damages them as much as it damages everyone else and PoC and gender binary activist vegans everywhere felt resentment that no one was educating themselves about why they were resentful all the time.

Social media was the vehicle of choice for this resentment and the cacophony of hurt feel olympics muted empathy or sympathy for one another. We stopped becoming human beings to one another and started becoming the targets for social media pile ons.

In NZ, the Party of the Famers, Bankers and Property speculators – the National Party – lost the election and promptly sunk into a pit of spite and resentment towards a political system of MMP that was purposely created to stop them having all the power.

Women’s refuge frontline staff who resentfully asked for less middle class food and more direct aid were resentfully attacked by resentful people resentful at being made to feel resentful and at a festival where there was less rhythm and too much vine, a young woman was sexually assaulted by having her glitter boob groped while she in turn assaulted the abuser in a manner which self defence can’t legally defend. This sparked off a debate where the latter was focused on far more than the fact the male had no right whatsoever to touch the woman in the first place.

The mainstream media of NZ decided that a solo mother stealing for her child 25 years ago was a bigger story than a Chinese Spy inside the National Party and Bill English and Steven Joyce were allowed to lie directly to the country about a hole in Labour’s budget that never existed.

Don Brash was resentful that he had to wake up and listen to Te Reo on Radio NZ each morning, while the rest of us felt resentful having to wake up to Guyon Espiner each morning, who has such a smug level of undeserved self importance that he probably cries out his own name during orgasm.

Climate change caused by pollution from humans has super heated the bio-sphere in manner not since since millions of years. The normal cycles of the planet that slowly heat the planet up and down have been over run by human made pollution which is leading the entire planet headlong into sudden and catastrophic climate change that will make it difficult for our species and most of the species on this planet adapt in time.

It is no longer a scientific question of why climate change is occurring anymore than it is a question of the Earth being round. The only people who are climate deniers are those who feel culturally alienated by having to agree with environmentalists and those economically tied to the current capitalism that is causing the pollution that is driving climate change.

Climate Change is no longer a scientific question, it is a political problem.

From now on, The Daily Blog will be naming all storms hitting NZ by the names of MPs who are doing sweet bugger all and by the NZ Corporations exacerbating climate change.

The truth is that out current political system is utterly incapable of acting with the urgency required so demonising the MPs and Corporations causing this is a fantastic way to generate the level of loathing and hatred to motivate voters into voting a radical party into power.

Look at the current Government’s response to global warming – to be carbon free by 2030.

It’s time to start fermenting the contempt required for enough voters to want to lash out at a political system too spineless and gutless to do what needs to be done in order to prepare NZ for the culture of adaptation we will need to survive the future our corporate overlords have locked us into and our Political Leaders have been too frightened to confront.

Disgustingly, the ‘journalist’ who wrote this spends the entire first half of the story simply regurgitating the lies of the Corrections Department. It’s not until the very last part of the story that the ‘journalist’ even mentions that Arthur was choked out during the forced transfer.

The sterilised language of the Corrections Department alleges that Taylor wilfully disobeyed an order while they moved him to another prison to help him live a life free of crime.

There is no actual explanation of what the fuck happened nor the context.

What actually happened is a goon squad forced their way into his cell, choked him out and then dragged his body out and transferred him to a new prison right in the middle of him taking Corrections to court!

This is a spiteful move by Corrections and a last chance for them to give Taylor the bash before he takes them to the Supreme Court.

In any other country that had some basic maturity, this story of Corrections choking out a Prisoner Rights activist while that prisoner is taking them to court would be the lead story.

In a country with a mainstream media that have spent decades making money out of demonising prisoners we get this bullshit from the NZ Herald.

It would be nice to see People Against Prisons Aotearoa championing this case, because their silence starts leading to the suspicion their focus is more on gender rights and not actual prisoner rights.

When the mainstream media scream against allegations that they are ‘fake news’, it’s this type of ‘journalism’ that gives proof that they are.

After the meth testing hysteria that so many NZ landlords hilariously fell for (and Housing NZ wasted millions of tax dollars trying to ‘fix’), poor old Landlords have had it tough.

They get subsidised by the Government through the counter productive living allowance, they don’t have to provide any long term tenancy security, they can endlessly raise the rents, they can throw anyone out under the bullshit ‘a-family-member-is-moving-in’ loophole, they’ve had decades of untaxed capital gains and they don’t have to provide a safe or healthy house.

The concerns have arisen as the government moves to implement dramatic reforms of the housing market.

The looming changes include:

* A capital gains tax on second homes, depending on the outcome of a special tax inquiry.

* The imposition of ‘ring-fencing rules’, which would reduce tax deductibility for rental houses, by ensuring losses cannot be set off against other income.

* An extension of the ‘bright line test’, under which anyone selling a rental home within five years would be deemed a trader and would therefore be taxed.

Property Investors Federation executive officer Andrew King said these planned changes were scaring off investors from the property market.

He said the personal hostility directed against landlords was another issue.

…you hear that folks?

That’s terror setting in.

That’s all those speculating landlords and newly acquired property portfolio middle classes feeling the sudden stall of their illusions of wealth.

The crash is starting and the cold reality of how in debt the property class find themselves is starting to sink in. Watch them thrash around and twist in the wind as the reality of that mountain of debt starts to implode upon them.

It’s difficult to know who the bigger snowflakes are, NZ Landlord’s or the NZ Farming industry. What the new Government must remember before the big money scams (that have made the NZ economy look far better than it really ever was) start threatening them is that democratically there are more 1st time non-speculator home owners, home renters and more people who don’t own property than do and that policy needs to help them into their new home or help keep their home.

Screw the speculating landlords, they’ve had it far too good for far too long and they are going to go septic once the crash kicks in.

They also vote National, so they will be no electoral gratitude from them in 2020.

As Israeli apologists attempt to smear Lorde’s courageous stance as bigotry, here’s the story of a Palestinian teenager – with a haircut freakishly similar to Lorde’s – who will be thrown inside prison for slapping an Israeli soldier who was invading her home…

OFER PRISON, West Bank (Reuters) – Israel indicted a 16-year-old Palestinian girl on Monday on charges including assault for punching an Israeli soldier in the face two weeks ago, an incident which made her into a hero for Palestinians and was seen as humiliating by right-wing Israelis.

Israel has held Ahed Tamimi since arresting her three days after she was filmed punching the soldier at the entrance to her family home in a village in the occupied West Bank. The confrontation took place after what Israel says was a stone-throwing assault on its troops.

The case has made her into such a potent symbol for Palestinians that a commentator in Israeli left-wing newspaper Haaretz said Israel risked turning her into the “Palestinian Joan of Arc”.

Right-wing Israelis, meanwhile, have debated whether the soldier had appeared weak by opting not to strike back. The Israeli army said he “acted professionally” by showing restraint.

The charge sheet against Tamimi, seen by Reuters, included counts of aggravated assault against a soldier, who the army said was bruised on his brow by her punch, obstructing a soldier in the performance of his duty and throwing stones at troops.

“Tamimi threw stones at them (the soldiers), threatened them, obstructed them in fulfilling their duty, took part in riots and incited others to take part in them,” the military said on its public affairs Twitter account.

Qadoura Fares, chairman of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, which advocates on behalf of Palestinians in Israeli jails, said the charges were false.

…when you have to trump up false charges against a teenage girl because she hit an occupying forces soldier who was invading her home, you know that the justification for this ongoing human rights obscenity has reached pretty barrel scrapping levels.

Ahed Tamimi is a heroine and she deserves better than these joke charges and brutal punishment.

This is why Lorde shouldn’t ever play Israel until they end their brutal occupation of every Ahed Tamimi.

Nothing sums up the madness of our failed 30 year neo-liberal experiment quite like the fact that we have handed over vital infrastructure like oil refinery to private companies whose interests are served by paying as little as possible for that infrastructure.

The recent disruption of supply because a digger severed the oil pipe while hunting Kauri would be hilarious enough, but a recent report into the threat of a tsunami wiping out our refinery infrastructure must demand more attention and intervention…

The threat from a massive tsunami to New Zealand’s fuel supply is much greater than previously thought, says a report to a government review of infrastructure.

Tsunami waves of up to 7.5m high hitting exposed parts of the east coast of the country — knocking out the refinery at Marsden Pt, tanks at other ports and other fuel infrastructure — are judged as more likely than when petroleum supply security was reviewed for the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment five years ago.

…Refining New Zealand is the industry funded pretence to pay for infrastructure so that the Government don’t wise up and demand more serious oversight, thankfully Resources Minister Megan Woods has ordered an inquiry into the fiasco last year and fingers crossed she extends the focus to whether or not this joke is fit for purpose.

For 30 years we have subcontracted vital physical and social infrastructure off to the free market and had a lowest cost service provided with zero vision.

Tobacco went up again on the 1st of January meaning the working classes, the poor and beneficiaries who use nicotine as an addictive crutch to self medicate the grim precariousness of their economic existence were all made far more stressed out and bitter cold turkeys, sinking more of the little disposable income they do have into their personal fix and coping mechanism.

Neato.

I don’t smoke cigarettes, it’s never been my bag and I despise any industry who sells addictive death with impunity, but I can taste counter productive social policy when I smell it and the current fanatical crusade against smokers is looking increasingly flawed.

Consistently hitting up users for more money means working class users are punished while Tobacco starts becoming a status symbol for wealth by the hip rich kids who can afford it.

By increasing the cost to the individual, we build up the pressure of addiction that fuels an unregulated black market while the industry walks away laughing all the way to the bank.

There are better ways to gain our goal of smoke free than this punitive and counter productive zealotry.

Rather than punish the user, go after the bloody industry. Consistently raising the price so the end user is forced to get more and more desperate to feed their addiction is not a solution. Create a vice tax that goes on the profit margin of the tobacco company. Put the pressure on the corporation to pay more of their profits rather than endlessly punish the end user.

On top of that, it is time for the mass subsidisation of vape so that smokers have a far less lethal and cheaper itch. The lack of second hand smoke damage means it could also be used in prisons and other places where health concerns prevent smoking.

Reducing cost as dramatically as vape does and allowing it inside prisons would empty the demand for a black market overnight.

We could do far more to end tobacco by punishing the corporations and supporting the smokers rather than endlessly punishing the smoker and allowing the corporations off the hook for their toxic poison.

Unfortunately it seems the zealots who run the anti-tobacco movement are only focused on going after the addict and not the dealer.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/04/isnt-it-time-to-reflect-on-fanatical-anti-tobacco-crusade/feed/16Does anyone really want anti-abortion death cult booties used for political grand standing? Really?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/04/does-anyone-really-want-anti-abortion-death-cult-booties-used-for-political-grand-standing-really/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/04/does-anyone-really-want-anti-abortion-death-cult-booties-used-for-political-grand-standing-really/#commentsWed, 03 Jan 2018 23:04:59 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95813It is incomprehensible to me how Abortion is still illegal in this country and the insulting hoops women are forced to jump through to get a medical procedure.

If a woman wants an abortion, she should be legally allowed to access that abortion for free with as little stress as possible with wrap around social services post operation.

End of story.

The fact everyone has to function under this mental health loophole is beneath our collective intelligence.

So how is the debate going in NZ?

Pretty appallingly.

As glacial progress is made in Parliament with a new Government already biting off more than it can chew, anti-abortionists are planning a pretty gross protest in the hopes of blocking the slow progress that has been made.

They have put out the call for 12000 booties so they can parade them in front of Parliament as a grotesque visualisation of the abortion numbers…

…after this grim display, they will donate the booties to new born infants, but does anyone really want anti-abortion death cult booties used for political grand standing?

Really?

Isn’t it difficult enough mentally, emotionally and physically to have an abortion? Why would you want to go out of your way to make those women feel even more shit with these kind of displays for political grand standing purposes?

Anti-abortion defenders will attempt to compare this to the Shoe Project that saw 606 pairs of shoes presented to Parliament as a visual protest against the suicide rate but such a bastardisation of that campaign to legitimise anti-abortion fanatics is an absurd false equivalence.

Preventing suicides under a broken mental health system is light years away from opposing safe and legal abortions.

One is about saving preventable deaths, the other is about demanding legal sovereignty over a woman’s body, they aren’t the same thing in any way shape or form.

Using dead foetuses for political grand standing is pretty fucking ugly and needlessly cruel to those women who have had abortions.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/04/does-anyone-really-want-anti-abortion-death-cult-booties-used-for-political-grand-standing-really/feed/24It’s not about Lorde being a ‘bigot’ – it’s about the brutal, violent & ongoing 50 year occupation of the Palestinian people!https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/02/its-not-about-lorde-being-a-bigot-its-about-the-brutal-violent-ongoing-50-year-occupation-of-the-palestinian-people/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/01/02/its-not-about-lorde-being-a-bigot-its-about-the-brutal-violent-ongoing-50-year-occupation-of-the-palestinian-people/#commentsMon, 01 Jan 2018 21:02:54 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95777If only the Israeli’s put as much effort into actual peace with the Palestinians as they do denouncing Lorde – we could have solved this whole mess decades ago!

The paranoid and delusional attacks on Lorde by Israel show the desperation and fear they feel by her courageous stand.

…firstly, while Russia certainly is a human rights abuser, they are not occupying and brutally repressing a people through a cultural genocide that has lasted 50 years! Attempting to compare Russia’s authoritarian regime with a human rights atrocity that has lasted 5 decades is a false equivalence that only the truly desperate would attempt.

Israel is screaming bigot and anti-semite to distract from this reality…

…the reason Israel is responding so viciously and with such vileness towards Lorde is because they are terrified that their arts & culture facade used to gloss over their human rights atrocities will be forever fractured by Lorde’s stance to boycott them.

As Gideon Levy noted in his lecture in NZ early last month, most Israeli’s are in total denial over the atrocity their occupation is creating and it is only by forcing them to confront that reality can any hope for the Palestinian people be established.

We force them to confront that by boycotting Israel economically, culturally, artistically and sporting wise.

The arrival of the New Year in California brought with it broad legalisation of marijuana, a much-anticipated change that comes two decades after the US state was the first to allow pot for medicinal use.

America’s most populous state joins a growing list of other states, and the nation’s capital, where so-called recreational marijuana is permitted even though the federal government continues to classify pot as a controlled substance, like heroin and LSD.

Pot is now legal in California for adults 21 and older, and individuals can grow up to six plants and possess as much as an ounce of the drug.

But finding a retail outlet to buy non-medicinal pot in California won’t be easy, at least initially. Only about 90 businesses received state licences to open on New Year’s Day. They are concentrated in San Diego, Santa Cruz, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Palm Springs area.

…the NZ Labour Party who are dragging their heels on real reform and allowing a legalised and taxed market which would cripple organised crime’s largest cash source need to dump the cautious approach and grow a spine.

Show some courage you cowards!

How the hell have we gotten to this insane position where we are more backwards on cannabis than the country to the home of the failed war on drugs?

Every single Fox News commentary trying to whip up domestic support for overthrowing the Iranian Government during the latest unrest seems to ignore America did this in 1953 and it was that coup which led to the harsh Islamic Theocracy ‬we have right now!

Their coup in 1953 was to remove the democratically elected Prime MinisterMohammad Mosaddegh who threatened American oil interests by wanting to nationalise Irans oil for the benefit of Iranians. The brutal Shah that America installed as a dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, killed off and imprisoned all moderate opposition leaving only the most radical strains of Islam for the people to rally around. Watching Americans scream about Russia interfering in their election while calling on America to interfere in Iran’s after everything America did in 1953 is dangerously schizophrenic.

Playing God in other people’s country with all the unforeseen blowback is how we got into this mess, I support democratic reform and respect for human rights for the Iranian people, I sure as fuck don’t support America (whose sanctions have helped cause this latest civil unrest in Iran by the way) poking around and playing God again.

There has been an enormous amount said about Lorde’s decision to not play Apartheid Israel. There have been hypercritical claims from some on the hard left that her stance is empty and self interested and there have been claims from pro-Israel critics she is being hypocritical.

Neither criticisms hold up to much scrutiny and both miss the far bigger picture that Lorde’s ignorance actually highlights for us.

First, let’s just admire Lorde’s apology…

..in a year where men couldn’t find the vocabulary to apologise, here is a young woman who admits a mistake, publicly acknowledges that she made a mistake and reverses her decision.

Lorde has shown more humility and courage in one apology than almost every male accused of inappropriate behaviour this year.

What is the most important part of Lorde’s apology and decision however is her acknowledged ignorance, but before looking at that, let’s just throw some of the criticisms used against her under a bus.

Some on the hard left have accused Lorde of merely being opportunistic in backing down from an Israeli tour…

…as the first Blog to come out and publicly call on Lorde to reverse her stance and publicise that she was actually playing Israel and as the only political Blog in NZ that gives weekly coverage to the brutal and horrific occupation of the Palestinian people, I reject those criticisms.

Lorde’s ignorance highlights a far deeper problem the BDS movement faces. I noted this at Gideon Levy’s brilliant lecture earlier this month that the cultural genocide of the Palestinian people has become a boomer movement without deeper awareness within Millennials. The reason for that is a point I’ll make later, but let’s also combat the pro-Israel criticisms.

Israel’s de facto ambassador in NZ, David Farrar, has run the Israeli propaganda line that Lorde is a hypocrite for playing in Russia and America because Russia is an authoritarian regime and America is run by Trump.

What this bullshit criticism utterly misses is the context here. Neither Russia or America are currently occupying a people to create a cultural genocide and bitterly punish them. Attempts to paint Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the 50 year illegal seizure and occupation of Palestinian land as the same thing is something only the truly desperate like Farrar and Israeli apologists would attempt.

It’s a bullshit comparison that is nonsense.

There is a hypocrisy, but it’s not the one Israel’s apologists are making.

The real hypocrisy here is that many of Lorde’s feminist activist base who are currently all swooning over her decision to not play Tel Aviv are the same who breathlessly lined up to buy Wonder Woman tickets despite the lead actress being a former member of the IDF and a pro-settler cheerleader because white middle class tertiary feminists wanting a kick arse action hero was more important than Palestinian human rights.

I digress.

Israel’s brutal 50 year occupation and theft of Palestinian lands is one of the great global human rights abuses on par with the atrocity of Apartheid South Africa and Israel with their apologists are always keen to paint any criticism of their cultural genocide as anti-semitism.

Which brings us to the real issue that Lorde’s ignorance highlights, the power of Israeli propaganda.

The ongoing violence used against the Palestinian people is hidden from the mainstream media. Too many news editors know the danger of ever discussing the illegal settlements and the injustice of Israel’s occupation because the claims of anti-semitism flow effortlessly from Israel’s rabid defenders.

Israel works hard to paint themselves out as progressive…

…the truth is the total opposite.

Israeli’s live in a cognitive dissonance when it comes to their occupation and refuse point blank to work for peace. It is only by applying enormous pressure upon Israel to do the right thing that any change can occur.

Gideon Levy himself noted that the only way to force Israelis from their denial was to boycott Israel on every possible level be it art, culture or sports.

Lorde’s decision to not play Israel is brave and legitimate, and her initial ignorance is a reminder of the power of pro-Israel propaganda.

If we were to seize this moment, we would start questioning the huge number of IDF members who are allowed to holiday in NZ and look to start applying travel bans as part of a concerted BDS effort.

Israel must never be allowed to believe that their brutal occupation of Palestine will be accepted or forgotten by people of conscience.

Talking of forgetting, let’s end on this…

…I think it’s always sad when a former great broadcaster ends up being irrelevant to the present debate. Brian sounds bitter that a young woman has made an ethical stance and all he’s left with are ‘but what about’ styled arguments that sound more like the nakedly self-conscious defensiveness of a man ignored.

Brian is better than this, we should remember him for what he did in broadcasting, not sorry brainfarts like this.

This image…

…should always impress upon us that Israel’s true desire is a cultural genocide and expulsion of the Palestinian people. That Israeli’s know first hand the Holocaust horror of the mass punishment they are now inflicting is merely an ironic symptom of how damaged they have become, it is no longer an excuse for their occupation.

Lorde showed real courage by rethinking her decision and refusing to play Apartheid Israel, we should show the same degree of courage, especially after our vote in the UN, to take this much further and apply more pressure like reviewing Israeli Defence Force members holidaying in NZ.

As Minister of Corrections, The Daily Blog urgently requests that you investigate the violence used on one of our Prisoner Rights Bloggers, Arthur Taylor.

While in the middle of crucial legal cases, Corrections have forced Arthur into a transfer that has ultimately made those legal cases far more difficult for him to prosecute.

This is incredibly questionable as some of these cases relate to Corrections. This is a direct interference in cases they are party to.

This self interested abuse of Arthur’s rights is however secondary to the violence used to make him go unconscious.

Here is his lawyers statement (Richard Francois) after Corrections tried to delay a meeting with Arthur…

“I was able to meet with Arthur at Waikeria at about 11:45 a.m.

He appeared ok, but described an ordeal, which, on the facts presented to me amounted to disproportionately severe treatment (torture) under s 9 of the NZBORA.

He showed me bruises and abrasions, which I observed were clearly from handcuff restraints around the wrist, and manhandling under the shoulder area and around the upper arms.

I will support unreservedly the breaches of all the rights and freedoms under the NZBORA and every mandatory violation of the Corrections Act and its Regs alleged by Arthur in the documents below.

When the State wilfully places an incarcerated prisoner in a situation that unnecessarily endangers his life without any justification at all, it loses its authority govern. To say it’s “routine”, in the New Zealand Herald is a lie.

Although we anticipated it, the Executive of Corrections has chosen to violate the last refuge of mutual trust between us. Yes, it lulled a vulnerable prisoner into a false sense of security that he wouldn’t be unlawfully transferred to a prison where he couldn’t pursue his Supreme Court claims and those in the Court of Appeal as well the High Court. These are senior court cases, and you can’t get around the Supreme Court. “

…the CCTV footage will have captured everything the Corrections Goon Squad did while forcibly transferring Arthur.

We urgently ask you to ensure that footage is not tampered with or goes missing and that an investigation is undertaken immediately in this violence.

I didn’t remember anything after being in the PCO’s office at Pare until I awoke in the Waikeria At-Risk Unit maybe 3-4 hours later wearing only a heavy canvas straitjacket with the sweat pouring off his brow from the heat.

It should be noted that At-Risk Units are only to be used as a precaution for suicide or when someone is at risk of harm, otherwise they could just get away with abusing prisoners by stripping them of everything, therefore there are strict legal precautions around using At-Risk Units in order to protect prisoners’ rights.

I banged on the cell doors until someone came.

They told me I would be seen by Dave Alty in the morning.

Next morning Dave Alty said to me; “Okay Arthur we’re going to put you in high security or low security.”

I said “You might as well put me in low security otherwise I’d still be in the high security unit, wouldn’t I?

A reliable source told me later that after I became unconscious in the A block PCO’s office at Pare, they carried me down the stairs and out of the block to where medical was called.

They couldn’t really do much because I was unconscious, and they couldn’t get proper readings, but my blood pressure was high, and then I was physically carried out while UNCONSCIOUS and strapped to a seat in the prison van with 6 prison officers and a nurse .

I was driven to Waikeria unconscious, and lifted out into a wheelchair where he was then placed in the At-Risk Unit. It is unheard of transferring a LOW security prisoner to a LOW security prison by FORCE .

I remember the officers’ cameras were turned on and so there is a recording of all that happened. I have put in a request to have the video released to my lawyer and will be having it released to the media (obviously not the Herald ) so the world can see how New Zealand prisoners are treated & the horrific things that often go on behind prison walls where public servants think they are unaccountable.

Arthur was asked directly how he was made unconscious, this was is response…

I’m not sure how they did it . All I remember is backing away in the PCO’s office in A Block , then 6 SERT members pouncing on me , then waking up in a straitjacket in an At Risk cell at Waikeria , covered in sweat ., about 3 hours later . I’ve had inside information that Solomon Nui co ordinated it . He is one of the officers I will be cross examining in March at the Auckland High Court in my NZ BOR claim about the October 2016 blanket strip search at Auckland Prison . I’m also told I was just placed unconscious in the prison van and a doctor didn’t examine me . It’s possible they used a choker hold , or gave me a concussion on the floor are even used a chloroform soaked rag – who knows ? I’ve asked for all CCTV foootage at all points along the way . I’m appealing for anyone who has information to contact my lawyer Richard Francoise in confidence if they prefer. (09) 358 3108 (027) 358 3108 . Perversely , they aren’t allowing me free calls to Richard btw.. Thanks for al your help .

…The Daily Blog is calling upon the Minister to investigate how our blogger came to be choked unconscious and forced into a transfer while he is making valid complaints agains the staff who are abusing him.

No where does the NZ Herald acknowledge that Arthur was choked unconscious by Prison staff and they only quote an anonymous source.

Here is Arthur’s response…

An anonymous Corrections spokesperson says I “kicked up a fuss” . Contrary to the “spokesperson”‘s assertion, I was never given the required notice of transfer, so of course I questioned its legality with the 6 “riot squad” members who burst into the computer room . This was far from the way transfers are normally conducted. The CCTV footage will show the truth in due course if this becomes an issue.

In the meantime , people can decide for themselves whether to believe a successful jailhouse lawyer AND successful criminal prosecutor like me or an anonymous “spokesperson”.

The Corrections “spokesperson” obviously forgot to tell the Herald’s Journalist that I was was rendered unconscious by the SERT team (Site Emergency Response Team) in the A Block Principal Corrections Officer’s office and didn’t regain consciousness until after arrival at Waikeria . I’m surmising that’s why they sent the nurse with me .

I’m requisitioning all CCTV footage to prove this . It’s an unheard of level of drama to transport a LOW Security inmate to a LOW Security prison .

…it is unacceptable for Corrections to choke Arthur out for a spiteful transfer which is being purposely done while Parliament is in recess and when the media aren’t paying attention.

He is being moved to make his continuing legal action against Corrections as difficult as possible.

This is the prison system punishing Arthur for his prisoner advocacy.

They choked him unconscious folks – that’s YOUR prison system in the year 2017.

See, when you actually compare what the planet will look like by 2030, being carbon neutral looks meaningless doesn’t it?

The magnitude of what we need to do to adapt to counter the nightmare unending capitalism has wrought upon the planet is simply beyond the capacity of the current political establishment.

Jacinda was 100% right when she called climate change our nuclear free moment. Unfortunately what she is proposing on climate change is about as pointless as the duck and cover advice in the event of a nuclear explosion from the 1950s.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/20/why-being-carbon-neutral-by-2030-is-meaningless-sophistry/feed/63So the Chinese spy inside the National Party tried to get another spy inside our military?!?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/20/so-the-chinese-spy-inside-the-national-party-tried-to-get-another-spy-inside-our-military/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/20/so-the-chinese-spy-inside-the-national-party-tried-to-get-another-spy-inside-our-military/#commentsTue, 19 Dec 2017 19:18:57 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95516

Months after first taking a seat in Parliament following the 2011 election, Yang took up the case of an aggrieved applicant for a New Zealand Defence Force job who had failed background checks conducted by the Security Intelligence Service.

Yang told the Herald he was merely acting on behalf of a constituent and had done nothing wrong. “I had simply sought answers on the constituents behalf through the appropriate channels, as is the responsibility of every Member of Parliament,” he said.

A February 2012 letter obtained under the Official Information Act written by then-Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman to the applicant, copied in Yang “who has approached my office on your behalf,” and noted Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson had also been lobbied.

So the Chinese spy inside the National Party tried to get another spy inside our military and still National voters see nothing wrong here?

If only the NZ media put as much focus on China having a spy inside the National Party as they did when Metiria admitted having to stealing from Welfare to feed her kid huh?

This story on the NZ Herald has within a couple of hours gone from being the lead to a barely seen mention on their front page now.

The best of the world are bemused, puzzled and quite frankly laughing at us about how laid back and casual we are all being over a Chinese spy inside a Party that used to be the Government!

2017 has been a year of swollen lies and political scandals. What was most concerning wasn’t that we didn’t have media who could unearth these outrageous abuses of power, but that we didn’t have a media who could spend the time to focus on them.

With our 7pm public squares filled with the likes of Hosking and diluted by the pettiness of The Project, there was no ability to take these scandals and make them wide spread movements of outrage once the enormity and ramifications of them were explained to the public.

The 24 hour news cycle has been reduced to the 15 minute news cycle. Filled by the never ending social media feeds of a million different voices all screaming something different, our attention span has been fractured and the things that really matter are eclipsed by whatever self personalised clickbait bullshit is now trending.

These were the top 10 biggest NZ political scandals and scams of 2017 which still demand our attention.

You know, just another day in NZ. No one checked if McCully’s claim of a $30m legal threat was even real, no one has seen an assessment of the money used, no one can explain why so many of the sheep died and no one can explain what ongoing benefit this breeding program gives NZ.

We just trusted Uncle Muzza with $11.5 million to try and cut a dodgy deal for reasons that are mercenary and without any actual ethics. Yay!

So what Official Information Act revelations did we get from MFAT in 2017?

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade did not provide legal advice to the government on the risk of being sued by a disgruntled Saudi Arabian businessman, documents reveal.

The admission that no legal advice on the lawsuit threat ever existed directly contradicts comments in 2015 by then-Foreign Minister Murray McCully that the ministry had taken advice on the issue.

The National government did an $11.5 million deal with Saudi businessman Hamood Al Ali Al Khalaf after Cabinet was advised in February 2013 that the Al Khalaf Group was threatening to sue New Zealand for $20-$30m. Mr Al Khalaf had invested heavily in New Zealand and believed New Zealand’s 2003 ban on live exports had left him misled and out of pocket.

Labour’s David Parker Photo: RNZ / Demelza Leslie

The deal included using taxpayer funds to build Mr Al Khalaf a $6m agrihub farm in the Saudi desert, as well as flying in over 900 sheep and handing over $4m in cash.

The government argued that the deal saved New Zealand from the risk of being sued for a much larger amount.

However, MFAT and Mr McCully have long refused to release any legal advice it relied on in doing the deal.

In a 2015 interview on TV3’s The Nation, Mr McCully was asked repeatedly what the advice said and whether he would release it.

He replied “it’s the ministry’s advice” and “I’m not going to release the ministry’s advice”. When asked if there was any legal basis for a lawsuit, he said “the advice was that those circumstances did provide such a basis”.

Yet an Official Information Act response from MFAT “following discussion with the Chief Ombudsman” has revealed “it did not seek or provide advice on the extent of the risk of a claim in the New Zealand courts for compensation from the Al Khalaf Group against the government”.

“Effectively, the minister had misled the public,” said Labour’s David Parker.

…well, well, well. So there actually wasn’t any investigation whatsoever of McCully’s bullshit claims that we were on the hook for a $30million dollar legal case if we didn’t bribe this businessman which means there was no justification whatsoever which means McCully lied to us and his own Caucus.

The issue was not that Murray McCully and the National Party are unethical pigs who’d sell their own grandmothers into slavery if it meant making a buck, the issue was why the Christ we were trying to bribe a Saudi businessmen to trade with the worst human rights abusers on the planet?

At the end of last year there were about 11,750 foreign trusts in New Zealand. Following the introduction of tough new rules, fewer than 3000 applied to register with Inland Revenue. Another 3000 told the tax department they did not want to be part of the new regime, and some 6000 are unaccounted for

…it turns out the only thing John Key could build was tax havens.

He lied to our faces, again.

8: National Party nothing more than a front for Chinese business interests and a Chinese Spy inside their Party

“As one commentator has said, the National Government never accurately costed it and made no provision in any of its long-term forecasts to pay for it.

“This is far from providing certainty.”

Government officials are now reviewing the programme to look for better value for money, he said.

“This is the responsible thing to do given the mess left by the previous government,” Mr Robertson said.

…so despite all the fanfare when National launched their Defence Force upgrade, Steven Joyce didn’t actually budget any money for that upgrade!

National are liars and manipulators of the worst kind, first they lie about a deficit in Labour’s budget that never existed, then boast about upgrading the Defence Force, then not budgeting for any of the upgrade they had just boasted about!!!!

6: The Todd Barclay scandal

So let’s get this straight.

Barclay lied for months about secretly taping a staff member. Bill English first didn’t know anything, then did know something, then questioned if any such tape even existed and then admitted to being asked to listen to the tape that never existed while National Party Board members bullied staff and made veiled threats.

On top of that, English fought tooth and nail to hide his involvement and leaned on the Police to ensure that happened.

Oh and it turns out Bill sent 450 text messages to the staff member in question but he “wasn’t involved”.

If this is all sounding unbelievable, let’s remind ourself of the 5 defences that National have used so far to explain that there’s no story here…

2: “The Barclay tapes are less like established facts and more like Yeti, as in that they are not yet proven or discovered”.

Despite telling the Police that Todd Barclay told him that he had secretly recorded staff, Bill’s tried to claim on the Nation that actually the tapes are less like established facts and more like Yeti, as in that they are not yet proven or discovered. This as an assertion is almost vomit inducing in terms of its audacity because Bill English was told by Todd Barclay that Todd Barclay secretly recorded staff!!!!

3: “I forgot that I talked to the Police”.

When Bill English wasn’t aware the media had his text message that he tried to hide, he claimed he couldn’t remember who had told him what or whom he may have talked to in regards to secret tapes that may or may not have existed. When it became apparent that the media had his text message saying that Todd had told him the tapes existed and they had made a huge pay out, the Prime Minister suddenly remembered! How miraculous for Bill to remember he was being untruthful and evasive when being untruthful and evasive was no longer an option.

4: “When I said I spoke to the Police, actually they spoke to me”.

After insinuating to Parliament that he had spoken to Police as a pro-active step to help investigate Barclay, it then turns out that what really happened was that the Police had to go to Bill English as part of their investigation, he didn’t go to them with what he knew. The PM effectively sold being forced into answering questions to the Police as an act of leadership, he misled the Parliament and now faces calls to be disciplined by the Speaker for his ‘imprecise’ language.

5: “My Office didn’t ask for the Police to censor what they released but we did suggest it”

The most outrageous of all these lies is that when the Police released their information to media, they redacted Bill’s damning text message. They did this after they contacted the PMs Office to see if the PM wanted that damning piece of evidence censored. The PMs Office replied that while it was totally up to the Police to release what they wanted, in the context of the text message being a private communication it was best they didn’t do that. So effectively, the PMs Office let the police know what the outcome they wanted was, the Police censored the text message and we wouldn’t even know all these lies and cover ups had occurred if the Journalists breaking the story didn’t already have the text message.

So why did Bill protect Todd? The answer is obvious.

National only have the barest of majorities in Parliament, here is a list of the legislation National have managed to pass by protecting Barclay…

Housing Legislation Amendment Bill

Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill

…this protection of Barclay has occurred because it allows National to keep passing laws. This abuse of power has occurred to protect National’s agenda.

5: NZ war crimes personally signed off by John Key

Nicky Hager teamed up with Jon Stephenson to produce a compelling prosecution of a war crime that John Key signed off on.

It is alleged with clear precision that John Key green lighted a revenge mission for the death of a NZ SAS soldier and because it was poorly planned and knee-jerk we have targeted and destroyed 12 houses, killed 6 innocent civilians (including a school teacher and a child) and seriously injured 15 others.

The targeting of civilians and gross incompetence marks this out as a possible war crime.

The former defense minister described the incident as the, “biggest and most dangerous operation in Afghanistan, a fiasco.

NZDF realised that the raid had gone wrong but instead covered it up and lied to media about what actually happened.

We, the people of New Zealand must demand an independent inquiry into what the fuck has happened here. Why were we lied to? Who did we kill? How did it happen? Have we committed war crimes? Will John Key be charged for these war crimes if they are war crimes?

If we as a country are going to cheer when our troops go to war to fight ‘da terrorists’ then we have to demand accountability when they kill civilians! We deserve to know the truth before John Key steps away from NZ altogether – did he or did he not order a poorly planned strike that killed 6 civilians?

To date, no one has been held account for this massacre.

4: The Meth testing industry of fraud

All that media inspired meth contamination hysteria to protect boomer rentals and state houses turned out to be bullshit!

Mr Twyford apologised on Checkpoint with John Campbell today for the treatment of a man who spent 58 weeks in emergency housing in a motel – costing the government $44,000, after traces of methamphetamine were found in his home.

Mr Twyford pledged to make changes to the existing regime.

Last night Checkpoint reported that Robert Erueti was evicted from his state house where he lived for more than 15 years in February last year.

Mr Twyford said yesterday Mr Erueti should never have been evicted from his HNZ home.

“I wanted to tell him that Housing New Zealand are changing their policy and they are moving to a new approach for dealing with this issue that I think is more compassionate and more considered.”

The minister said if methamphetamine traces were found now support, not eviction, would be the first approach.

“Over the last three years Housing New Zealand, on behalf of the tax payer, has spent $75 million on testing and remediating houses that are or were allegedly contaminated.”

Mr Twyford said this had left hundreds of properties empty.

…lap it up sleepy hobbits, $75million on bullshit meth hysteria propagated by ex-Police ‘clean up teams’ who have done everything in their power to demonise beneficiaries and renters.

How many were kicked out of homes for this self-interested spite?

Oh the hilarity of watching Landlords caught up in the P contamination hysteria…

Some landlords with meth-contaminated houses are avoiding telling local authorities to ensure their houses don’t lose value.

The investors say having the information on their property’s council file – even if the chemical residue is later removed – carries stigma, and will put buyers off. While the behaviour is not illegal, one home-owner’s association said it was “unscrupulous to say the least” not to report contamination, as that meant any future owners or tenants were denied access to the property’s full history.

“I think a lot of landlords are scurrying around trying to keep things under the radar because they don’t want to spend the money to properly remediate a contaminated home,” said Home Owners and Buyers Association (Hobanz) president John Gray.

“But there’s a line that has to be drawn somewhere.”

The Herald first found evidence of the trend in online property investors’ forums, where owners were discussing how to get the council to help evict tenants without the contamination going on a Land Information Memorandum (Lim) report.

Hobanz and Auckland Council confirmed they were aware of the behaviour.

Auckland Council’s regional environmental control manager Marcus Herrmann said people avoided reporting contamination for a variety of reasons, including uncertainty about remediation requirements, and the effect on their profits.

“They believe the stigma attached to having the information on their property file will affect the value of their home,” he said.

Herrmann said while there was no legal obligation, it was appropriate for landlords to inform the council to ensure health and safety of tenants and prospective owners. Methamphetamine is considered a health risk.

If a house has been a lab, police usually inform the council which then undertakes testing. However, health authorities or private owners who become aware of contamination are also expected to pass on any information.

The first time I half-heard a news report about Housing New Zealand tenants “contaminating” homes by smoking methamphetamine in them, I assumed it was a mistake. Clandestine labs, sure: they can leave behind some some hazardous chemicals, depending on the actual process employed. But a dwelling being rendered uninhabitable and needing to be torn apart simply because meth was consumed in it? It didn’t seem possible.

It isn’t possible.

…as Russell Brown painstakingly points out, houses that test positive for P being smoked in them are not the health issue that the moral panic over P has produced.

The primary method of drug testing is the urine test, but this is a terribly blunt tool.

Favoured because it’s quick and low cost, it tests for the metabolites of drugs rather than the chemicals themselves and as such it fails to differentiate between on- and off-the-clock use. That means occasional marijuana users test positive for a week or more after a single smoke.

Tests that treat recreational use as being the same as use on the job are a problem. While marijuana affects a user’s ability to work or drive safely at the time, occasional use has no lingering effects beyond a good night’s sleep. While the metabolites remain in the system for long periods, the drug’s narcotic effect is gone within a few hours. Testing for after-hours use is essentially little more than a test of character – something that can be better accomplished without chemistry.

…in NZ we are simply too immature a culture to be able to have adult discussions on drugs and effective standards for those drugs. We see the drug as illegal and ANY suggestion that it is being taken becomes the rational for firing someone or demolishing a house. We are too juvenile to comprehend that simply testing positive for a drug isn’t impairment, add to this former Police Officers keen to cash in on drug moral panic by becoming ‘drug testing companies’ and we get a perfect storm of policy designed by morons.

How many millions have been wasted on this hysteria? How many lives destroyed by throwing people out not the street?

Remember – any beneficiary caught testing positive were banned from Housing NZ for 12 months – no wonder we had 40 000 homeless and a motel policy that blew out to $50 million.

This is NZ in the 21st Century, a selfish child easily spooked into spite.

3: Police, GCSB and SIS abuse of power

The SIS, who effectively get to write the laws they are supposed to follow, were caught out illegally taking data for over 17 years and they have done everything in the power to hide that…

In a report released today, Gwyn has spelled out her belief that the NZSIS unlawfully access Customs’ data for 17 years.

She details how the service had access to a Customs’ computer terminal, which allowed agents to do a massive trawl of information that “detailed the movement of 11 million passengers each year”.

She said the resulting database would include “data relating to a large proportion of New Zealanders”.

She said the NZSIS had ignored requests for information on how much data it held and she had asked again for it to be provided within three months.

…look at the lengths the Secret Intelligence Service went to avoid scrutiny…

The NZSIS had access to the data since 1997 through a “CusMod” terminal in the service’s offices.

It allowed intelligence staff to create a travel alert for an individual by entering a name and other identifying features, or to search past travels to gather information.

A halt was called to access to the terminal to gather data on November 24, 2014.

“This was the result of concerns identified by various Government agencies involved as to the legal basis upon which NZSIS access occurred,” Gwyn’s report said.

On December 12, 2014, a new law came into effect leading to an agreement that allowed NZSIS access to the terminal under strict conditions. It lasted a year.

The new rules limited to five the number of intelligence service staff who could access the terminal, limited use to counter-terrorism investigations and also restricted the amount of information NZSIS could access.

Gwyn found, and the NZSIS conceded, that the rules were never followed.

Contrary to its undertaking, the NZSIS pulled details “about particular individuals’ travel movements”, never set up access rules around the terminal allowing continued broad use of it and sought data other than for counter-terrorism investigations.

The NZSIS then went on to ignore a Memorandum of Understanding it signed in August 2015, under which it agreed to provide a list of those who would access the terminal.

On June 15, 2016, NZSIS was again told to stop accessing Customs’ data.

Gwyn said the access to the terminal before 2014 was unlawful – but that the NZSIS carried on acting unlawfully even when told what it had to do to stay inside the law.

An investigation by the NZSIS internal team that monitors compliance with the law, took place between June and August 2016, after which limited and legal access to the data took place.

Gwyn said she had no idea how much data the NZSIS had “unlawfully obtained” and how it was intending to handle that data.

She said she gave the NZSIS a report in May 2016 detailing why accessing Customs’ data was unlawful, with a recommendation it report on how much information it held.

She said the NZSIS had not provided her with any information on that. She said the service had also ignored recommendations to talk with her office and the Privacy Commissioner over the “unlawful” access to data.

…they view the law and the rules as a joke they don’t have to laugh at. Remember, this is the same Secret Intelligence Service who colluded with John Key’s Office to falsely smear the Leader of the Opposition, Phil Goff, months before the 2011 election. They have shown they have no problems interfering with NZ elections and with the extra resourcing and powers they’ve been given, they seem to be a law unto themselves.

How does this mass surveillance and breach of any checks and balances over their power make any of us safer?

It’s not just the upper echelons of our Intelligence Community that is drunk on their own power, look at what the Police are trying to get away with…

Rolf and Ute Kleine, who run teahouse and bakery Takaka Infusion, obtained police documents through their lawyer in November that reveal their house was bugged with a surveillance device 20 days prior to a police search of their home in 2015.

The Kleines have lodged a statement of claim with the Nelson High Court and are suing police next year.

They say both searches and their warrant applications were unlawful and illegal, and they had been inaccurately profiled by police seeking those responsible for a threat to Fonterra to put 1080 pesticide into baby milk formula.

We have Police and Intelligence Agencies stepping well outside the law and not getting punished for it.

This is a deeply concerning slide towards huge Police State powers with no ability to reign them in.

2: Key lied about mass surveillance

David Fisher must be in the running for best Journalist 2017 with this extraordinary investigation into how the sleepy hobbits of Muddle Nu Zilind were played and conned into believing Key was being honest when he claimed there was no mass surveillance plans for New Zealand…

Key always claimed the Speargun project to tap New Zealand’s internet cable was stopped in March 2013.

But new documents show development of Speargun continued after the time he had said he ordered a halt – apparently because the scheme was “too broad”.

Instead, they show Speargun wasn’t actually stopped until after Key was told in a secret briefing that details were likely to become public because they could be in the trove of secrets taken by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

…Fisher’s conclusion is damning…

It means that Key knew more than a year before the “Moment of Truth” event that it was possible Snowden would release details of a project intended to scan all internet traffic coming into New Zealand.

…Key knew Snowden knew the NZ Government were planning a mass surveillance program that would be controlled by the NSA and he lied directly to NZ to hide this fact.

Remember, the NSA were still using remote surveillance of Dotcom even after NZ intelligence agencies had switched them off…

The illegal spying which earned Kim Dotcom an apology from former Prime Minister Sir John Key went on two months longer than previously admitted, according to a High Court judgment.

The revelation – if accurate – would open a can of worms over sworn admissions the GCSB has made in the High Court and the Court of Appeal over assistance given to police ahead of the FBI-inspired 2012 raid which saw Dotcom and three others arrested.

It could also raise the possibility of a fresh apology to Dotcom because Key’s apology was in the context of spying from December 16, 2011 through to January 20, 2012.

Questions have been asked of Prime Minister Bill English but he has not responded. A spokesman for GCSB Minister Chris Finlayson referred questions to the GCSB, even though previous issues around the illegal spying have been handled at ministerial level.

Remember the timeline here…

March 8th 2011 – Jerry Mateparae is stepped down as head of the GCSB.March 15th 2011 – Top NSA spook, James Clapper, flies to NZ to meet with Key to discuss ‘synchronicity’ between the NSA and GCSB.March 22nd 2011 – High level intelligence meetingsMay 2011 – McCully visits WashingtonJune 17th 2011 – Key meets with Ian Fletcher for breakfast at Stamford Plaza.July 22nd 2011 – Key is invited to Washington as pay back for this new ‘synchronicity’.July 26th 2011 – Key side steps normal protocols and appoints his old school friend Ian Fletcher to take over at the GCSB.October 2011 – John Key, the head of the SIS and NZDF join Ian Fletcher, the MFAT Head, and the DPMC boss for a secret dinner at the British High Commissioner’s homeDecember 8th 2011 – A letter states that Key is going to meet Ian Fletcher on 12th DecemberDecember 12th 2011 – Key meets with Ian Fletcher.December 14th 2011 – The Police boss responsible for spying on Dotcom meets John Key with other intelligence agencies present.December 16th 2011 – Kim Dotcom starts to be illegally spied upon.January 2012 – Raid on Kim Dotcom. Spying supposedly ends.

Operation Speargun was set up to tap our Southern Cross cable and was waiting for the new GCSB law to pass, the GCSB law that Key claimed stopped mass surveillance, yet every other legal expert said would allow for mass surveillance. So the evidence is that Operation Speargun was running and was simply waiting for the legislation to pass, the very legislation that the GCSB went and briefed the NSA on. The documents Key released claiming that he stopped this plan show nothing of the sort.

This concentration of power follows a very clear path set out upon by National.

Remember:

National gave the Police vast new retrospective surveillance powers

National rammed through legislation under urgency allowing the State to force civil telecommunication companies to build backdoors to their networks and not tell their customers that the State had breached their privacy.

National rammed through legislation under urgency allowing the State to spy on NZers

The GCSB went from $80m to $140m in budget per year

The SIS were ‘rewarded’ with a huge increase in powers and budget.

The SIS colluded with John Key’s Office to falsely smear the Leader of the Opposition Phil Goff months before the 2011 election.

Warrantless spying

And National gave these security agencies even more powers that will allow…

So what conclusions can we draw here about the mass surveillance state in New Zealand?

The unbelievable way New Zealanders and the mainstream media framed the Moment of Truth as a giant waste of time because Kim didn’t prove Key knew about him before he claimed shows the juvenile nature of our news culture.

Let’s remind ourselves what the great luminaries of our mainstream media had to say about the Moment of Truth…

Prime Minister John Key will be relieved the much talked about Moment of Truth passed by without seriously damaging his credibility.

There was no great reveal, no smoking gun, nothing to make New Zealanders believe they are being illegally spied upon.

Mr Key said neither had provided any actual evidence of their claims and said it was simply rhetoric.

“What they’re doing is making unsubstantiated claims. The Government has provided evidence that shoots down their arguments. If they want to provide evidence that supports their claims, last night was their chance and they failed to produce anything other than rhetoric.”

The initial fallout from last night’s meeting was very much, where was the bombshell? It was a question Dotcom did not answer adequately, choosing instead to attack the standard of journalism in this country.

Last night’s events were nearly overshadowed by the lack of information around an email which Kim Dot Com claimed showed John Key was involved in a plot with Hollywood company Warner Brothers to have him extradited to the US. Dot Com has long said Mr Key knew of his existence long before the raid on his Coatesville mansion. Warner Brothers swiftly denied that the email is real, as did the MPAA.

The event had been billed for months as showing proof of this plot, but it didn’t warrant a mention on stage last night, and Dotcom refused to answer questions on the email, saying it has been referred to Parliament’s privileges committee.

“The mass surveillance issue was always a red herring, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden presented no concrete evidence of privacy breaches, Julian Assange was a sideshow. Snowden’s revelation that the NSA had an operation in Auckland has to be followed up.”

For now, however, those questions are likely to be overshadowed by Dotcom’s spectacular failure to prove his central claim that John Key lied about his knowledge of Dotcom before a raid on the German’s Coatesville mansion.

The vast majority of the mainstream media in NZ all decried the Moment of Truth as an enormous fail and wrote it off.

The Moment of Truth had Assange, Greenwald and Edward Snowden prove without a shadow of a doubt that John Key had lied through his teeth about mass surveillance. It showed the NSA and CIA have staff here, it showed they planned to spike the sea cable and steal data directly from that feed and it showed that our GCSB went and met with the NSA to assure them the law Key had just pushed through allowed for mass surveillance despite Key telling the NZ public that it didn’t.

But what did NZ focus on? Kim not proving Key knew he existed before he claimed to have known.

We are our own worst enemies.

You were conned New Zealand.

1: The NZ mainstream media utterly missing in action for 9 years

The greatest fraud in the BIMS reports that highlight the horror of National’s 9 years in power is that the NZ mainstream media unquestioningly allowed these scumbags to get away with it for a decade!

Where the hell was the NZ media for the last 9 years when the conclusions of the BIM reports were so obvious to everyone else?

Let’s call the last 9 years of National’s rule what it really was – class-austerity. A draconian policy that destroyed the most vulnerable but because media are middle class they never saw it and allowed them to get away with it.

How can we have such an apocalyptic conclusion of 9 years worth of policy failure and the vast majority of NZ media not pick up on the enormity of damage being perpetrated?

How did this all go unnoticed for so long?

The biggest story for the mainstream media this year was demonising and destroying Metiria Turei for having the audacity to tell her story of misleading Social Welfare to feed her child with her chin up.

Net worth is the balance of what New Zealanders own over what they owe, and this is the biggest increase experienced in the last 10 years, he said.

…National’s mass migration property speculative bubble meant the middle classes would vote National even if that meant National wanted to ban science at their local school in favour of creation theory.

The middle classes have been missing in the fight against National because they were made paper millionaires by them. That is why National are still recording over 44% in the polls and it won’t change until the economy gets hit by the next economic meltdown.

The middle class aspiration to make money out of property has erased their egalitarian values and it changes the political landscape. The new Government have to adapt to this reality and promote policy that helps those who aren’t property speculators because they won’t ever vote for Labour.

In putting together Kiwibuild, the new Government should consider putting all Crown Landin Auckland on the table and crush the land bankers.

In the past the infamous Labour Party Summer BBQ was used by Labour MPs to plot against the current leader who wasn’t succeeding in the polls. Phil Goff attempted to re-invent it by hosting a Summer BBQ when he was still leader.

I know this because I got an invite.

He invited a plethora of journalists and media types who had sympathies with the Left out to his farm and put on a huge spread. It was a smart idea that went some way to helping keep the faith and personalise relationships he used in the 2011 election.

As Labour eyes their first time as Government in 9 years, they must acknowledge they face a media landscape utterly against them. Hosting an annual summer BBQ at the Prime Minister’s house with the purpose of building personal relationships with those who side with their aims and goals would be a smart tradition to re-start.

The evidence about palliative care is that pain and other symptoms, such as fatigue, insomnia and breathing issues, actually improve as people move closer to death.

More than 85 percent of palliative care patients have no severe symptoms by the time they die.

Evidence from the Australian Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) at the University of Wallongong shows that there has been a statistically significant improvement over the last decade in pain and other end-of-life symptoms.

…more than 85% of palliative care patients have no severe symptoms by the time of death? The issue here is that palliative care is expensive, and what the Government are suggesting is cost cutting.

It should come as no surprise that ACT, the far right political party are pushing for this reform. For them it is the perfect collusion of total individualism (the act to kill yourself) and the purity of the market to efficiently end those no longer contributing.

Self-assisted suicide – which is what we are really discussing here, not the far more sterilised ‘euthanasia’, will become a means to a neoliberal end in NZ.

Look at the horrific manner in which NZs institutes treat the most vulnerable. Look at how we treat the mentally ill, the poor and prisoners. How long do any of you honestly believe it will take for some Wellington bureaucrat to start planning to use this legislation for all those costing the health budget?

We are being conned into believing euthanasia is a solution to a fear of living in pain during death that isn’t the reality for the vast majority of us.

This legislation is to appease alpha personalities who can not tolerate the idea of needing help in the painful end of their lives, but it will be used against the poorest and most vulnerable who are already so easily abused by the State.

The group says in a new report today that the new Labour Government needs to rewrite the principles of welfare law after previous Governments led by both Labour and National gave priority to helping people back to work.

“The first task is to examine the underlying values and principles that would be at the foundation of policy changes,” it says.

“Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) believes these principles must include adequacy, belonging and participation, simplification, removal of discrimination, reduction of disincentives and a welfare system that puts children first.”

Once upon a time in New Zealand, the agencies of state welfare were constructed as an instrumental and direct means to ensure our egalitarian values.

Social welfare was seen as a way to redistribute back to the most vulnerable amongst us and these agencies were critical in carrying out that redistribution.

There was a pride involved in this public service, our compassion made us unique and it built the values from which we as New Zealanders have benefitted from.

That simply is no longer the case.

For the last 30+ years, the neoliberal experiment has turned our once egalitarian welfare state into a neoliberal welfare state. The branches of social welfare, the MoD, CYFS, Corrections, Parole Services, Housing NZ, WINZ and Mental health have all been warped and mutated into weapons to punish the poor for being vulnerable.

In a culture of selfish consumerism where success is private and failure is personal , we see the poor as victims of their own circumstance rather than as a result of the hegemonic structures of power.

The poor, the vulnerable, the weak, the sick and the disabled do everything in their power now not to be needing assistance from these Government agencies, because these Government agencies don’t help, they only punish.

We have a Paroles Service that almost every NGO despises having to work with because it’s staffed by people who enjoy the power they have over prisoners lives and are concerned with only throwing them back into prison.

WINZ are so spiteful to these people that a 1000 of them lined up to gain assistance from AAAP. Some had walked since before dawn to arrive in time to get help. Many were in tears and emotionally distraught by the way WINZ had treated them.

What kind of an indictment is that?

After 9 years of National, our public service has become a highly politicised and increasingly ideologically damaged entity which threatens to stop any progressive change that the new Government may want to enable.

Highly politicised because public servants have manipulated rules to provide their political masters with information they shouldn’t be able to access, (Winston’s pension over payment being the most recent example), and increasingly ideological because almost the entire welfare state is geared towards punishing beneficiaries rather than helping them.

If the new Government want to force their agenda through, they must begin by radically purging previous political appointees. There are thousands of positions that now need filling on various Quangos throughout the country and Labour needs to start immediately there to ensure their eyes and their ears are sitting on Boards to ensure policy implementation isn’t being stymied by right wing Public Servants.

Now would be a good time to sit down with the PSA to see if they are genuine in improvement of public service values rather than protecting their members jobs. If such a partnership is possible, Labour could use that relationship to force the State sector bosses to change ideological direction, but Labour could also force change by supporting socially progressive NGOs critical of social policy to critique the welfare agencies.

Setting up a whistle blower 0800 number so that public servants can dob in their managers and bosses who are ignoring their public service obligations would also be a good means of forcing change.

Passing new policy is one thing, having a right wing public service implement it is another.

If you are serious about changing welfare in NZ Carmel, then end the punitive debt and crushing punishment that is dealt out to those on Welfare. The bullshit need for the disabled to send in letters annually for disabilities that can’t be ‘cured’. The penalty interest rates put on welfare overpayments, the culture of fear that alienates and the staff who refuse to inform beneficiaries of what their actual rights and entitlements are.

Give AAAP a contract to critique your welfare departments and fund them to help beneficiaries gain their rights. Nothing will make a neoliberal welfare department jump like contempt media criticism.

Carmel, you have inherited a nightmare but you can make and force real change on this right wing monstrosity.

Remember, these are really the best case scenarios we are talking about…

Floods, droughts, wildfires coming Extreme rainfall, severe droughts and wildfires could hit Auckland in years to come, according to a Niwa study on the impact of climate change on the region.

The report said the climate over the Auckland region would get hotter and the weather more volatile over the next century.

If global emissions continued on their present path, Auckland would have 70 more days over 25C each year — meaning a quarter of the year would have temperatures above this.

Average temperatures would also increase by up to 3.75C by 2110.

…this report doesn’t include what happens if there is a jump in temperatures caused by any one of the numerous environmental feedback loops from Antarctica ice sheet failure, desalination shutting down oceanic temperature currents, permafrost methane release or ocean floor methane release from the heating of the oceans. The impacts of the small temperature increase are already here and having an enormous impact now…

2017: Our extreme year of weather This year is shaping up to be one of New Zealand’s worst ever for extreme weather events, following a spate of major fires, floods and storms.

Civil Defence officials declared a record number of weather-related state of emergencies – eight compared to one last year and four in 2015.

Insurers have meanwhile put losses from the year’s events, all which hit in the first seven months, at $242 million – five times that of 2016’s bill for extreme weather and also eclipsing others.

Meteorologists say it’s not simply climate change at play, but a combination of ocean-driven effects that happened to make for a dramatic year.

…and the frightening truth is that climate change is far, far, far worse than anyone is acknowledging…

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

…all up the current political spectrum can not adapt fast enough to deal with the vast changes climate change will cause.

I think the Greens and Labour could politically splinter because of Climate Change.

Economically the NZ Greens believe the market acts well when pollution is included into the cost of the end product. This allows the market to regulate the environment as well as ethical business.

For Labour, environmental protection is necessary to continue harvesting it for the future so workers can continue working. It’s prudence, not an emergency.

For the Greens and Labour, environmentalism is a branding exercise that boosts the economy while protecting the environment and the market at the same time.

The truth is that climate change is an existential crisis to that model of thinking.

Economic, social and cultural adaptation is the only way to respond to the realities of climate change and radical green socialism is the only response to that reality.

The current Green Party are locked into middle class identity politics and middle class environmentalism while Labour are too frightened to use the power of the State to intervene well beyond the timid measures currently being proposed.

You can’t make money from climate change and pretending you can is why the current political spectrum will ultimately splinter as their solutions aren’t really solutions.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/17/why-climate-change-could-politically-splinter-the-greens-and-labour/feed/10Why should we trust SIS, GCSB & Police with more power when they can’t use their current powers legally?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/16/why-should-we-trust-sis-gcsb-police-with-more-power-when-they-cant-use-their-current-powers-legally/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/16/why-should-we-trust-sis-gcsb-police-with-more-power-when-they-cant-use-their-current-powers-legally/#commentsFri, 15 Dec 2017 19:57:17 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95253

Just consider what we are seeing. The SIS, who effectively get to write the laws they are supposed to follow, has been caught out illegally taking data for over 17 years and they have done everything in the power to hide that…

In a report released today, Gwyn has spelled out her belief that the NZSIS unlawfully access Customs’ data for 17 years.

She details how the service had access to a Customs’ computer terminal, which allowed agents to do a massive trawl of information that “detailed the movement of 11 million passengers each year”.

She said the resulting database would include “data relating to a large proportion of New Zealanders”.

She said the NZSIS had ignored requests for information on how much data it held and she had asked again for it to be provided within three months.

…look at the lengths the Secret Intelligence Service went to avoid scrutiny…

The NZSIS had access to the data since 1997 through a “CusMod” terminal in the service’s offices.

It allowed intelligence staff to create a travel alert for an individual by entering a name and other identifying features, or to search past travels to gather information.

A halt was called to access to the terminal to gather data on November 24, 2014.

“This was the result of concerns identified by various Government agencies involved as to the legal basis upon which NZSIS access occurred,” Gwyn’s report said.

On December 12, 2014, a new law came into effect leading to an agreement that allowed NZSIS access to the terminal under strict conditions. It lasted a year.

The new rules limited to five the number of intelligence service staff who could access the terminal, limited use to counter-terrorism investigations and also restricted the amount of information NZSIS could access.

Gwyn found, and the NZSIS conceded, that the rules were never followed.

Contrary to its undertaking, the NZSIS pulled details “about particular individuals’ travel movements”, never set up access rules around the terminal allowing continued broad use of it and sought data other than for counter-terrorism investigations.

The NZSIS then went on to ignore a Memorandum of Understanding it signed in August 2015, under which it agreed to provide a list of those who would access the terminal.

On June 15, 2016, NZSIS was again told to stop accessing Customs’ data.

Gwyn said the access to the terminal before 2014 was unlawful – but that the NZSIS carried on acting unlawfully even when told what it had to do to stay inside the law.

An investigation by the NZSIS internal team that monitors compliance with the law, took place between June and August 2016, after which limited and legal access to the data took place.

Gwyn said she had no idea how much data the NZSIS had “unlawfully obtained” and how it was intending to handle that data.

She said she gave the NZSIS a report in May 2016 detailing why accessing Customs’ data was unlawful, with a recommendation it report on how much information it held.

She said the NZSIS had not provided her with any information on that. She said the service had also ignored recommendations to talk with her office and the Privacy Commissioner over the “unlawful” access to data.

…they view the law and the rules as a joke they don’t have to laugh at. Remember, this is the same Secret Intelligence Service who colluded with John Key’s Office to falsely smear the Leader of the Opposition, Phil Goff, months before the 2011 election. They have shown they have no problems interfering with NZ elections and with the extra resourcing and powers they’ve been given, they seem to be a law unto themselves.

How does this mass surveillance and breach of any checks and balances over their power make any of us safer?

It’s not just the upper echelons of our Intelligence Community that is drunk on their own power, look at what the Police are trying to get away with…

Rolf and Ute Kleine, who run teahouse and bakery Takaka Infusion, obtained police documents through their lawyer in November that reveal their house was bugged with a surveillance device 20 days prior to a police search of their home in 2015.

The Kleines have lodged a statement of claim with the Nelson High Court and are suing police next year.

They say both searches and their warrant applications were unlawful and illegal, and they had been inaccurately profiled by police seeking those responsible for a threat to Fonterra to put 1080 pesticide into baby milk formula.

National did all they could to hide the poverty their mass immigration and speculative property bubble created while their draconian spiteful welfare system punished anyone too poor to escape it.

National refused to measure poverty and refused to acknowledge there was a housing or homelessness crisis.

Against that track record, Labour looks like Mother Teresa.

The problem of course is that this simply makes up for the last couple of decades underfunding, it doesn’t really change the wider environment that makes poverty a cultural and social problem.

The fact that we only talk about children in poverty rather than poor people in general highlights that our 30 year neoliberal culture which places success and failure on the individual still shapes the entire debate.

This is a great start, but to truly change we need a new Government who will use the looming economic meltdown as an opportunity to borrow and invest directly into the social infrastructure to handle the jump in poverty that economic recession will cause…

Red alert: Australia’s economy in trouble The OECD warned Australia on its debt levels in March. The IMF warned us in October. Now the Bank of International Settlements has flipped on the alarms. That’s the whole set of global financial institutions sitting in our rear view mirror telling us to slow the heck down.

These include rising debt, strong demand for more loans and an increase in past-due debt, according to KPMG’s latest survey of non-bank lenders.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/16/in-9-weeks-labour-has-done-more-to-eradicate-child-poverty-than-national-did-in-9-years/feed/12Why I do not welcome euthanasia in New Zealandhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/14/why-i-do-not-welcome-euthanasia-in-new-zealand/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/14/why-i-do-not-welcome-euthanasia-in-new-zealand/#commentsWed, 13 Dec 2017 22:05:52 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95269

Hello, I’m barely politically relevant anymore

When I look at the horror our mental health system, prison system & welfare systems have become for the most vulnerable via chronic underfunding & indifferent staff – I fear how euthanasia will mutate in that cruel environment.

The way we treat the mentally ill, suicide victims, prisoners, the elderly and the poor with such contempt makes me believe that state sanctioned euthanasia will quickly become a means for pushing the poor to end their lives sooner.

It should surprise no one that it is ACT who is driving this movement. Euthanasia fits perfectly well within the far rights belief of individualism above all and the efficiency of the market to eradicate cost.

The loop holes available in this legislation means it is only a matter of time before someone is pushing to expand their definition for cost cutting measures.

The National Party were actively and secretly looking for ways to disqualify the sick and vulnerable from state health care. If they were prepared to do it when euthanasia was illegal in the 1990s, imagine how quickly they will begin to pressure hospitals to start euthanasia as a cost cutting measure if it becomes legal?

We know how poorly Corrections look after the welfare of prisoners. We know how badly CYFs looks after children in their care. We know how damaging Housing NZ, WINZ and the Ministry of Development treat beneficiaries.

So what would stop Government agencies applying the same disregard for the poor and sick if euthanasia is passed?

The Government has officially ended the National Standards programme, meaning schools from next year will no longer have to report on them annually.

Labour has had a long-standing position to scrap National Standards and Education Minister Chris Hipkins says both schools and parents had lost confidence in them.

While schools will no longer report on National Standards they will still be able to use the assessment tool in the classroom to report child progress against the curriculum.

National Standards were always an attempt by National to infect public education with a neoliberal philosophy. National Standards were always a means to create league tables so that National could manufacture a fake competition model between schools.

This was never about the educational needs and simplification of explaining grades to parents, it was always about building the infrastructural data to allow league tables.

That this nonsense has been killed off is great, but Labour needs to do far more to genuinely re-invest in public education than just kill off stupid right wing experiments.

Forget the Housing failure, the homelessness failure, the health service failure, the education failure, the prison failure, the transport failure, the environmental failure, the social issues failure and the infrastructure failure, just look at the current incredulous self-righteousness being spouted by National over the last week.

Gerry Brownlee attacks Jacinda for having the guts to stand up to Australia and demands that we just look the other way while human rights are abused on Manus Island.

And Bill English has the audacity of complaining about removing the word ‘vulnerable’ from the Children’s Ministry because his neoliberal version of welfare differentiates between Children in need from Children in danger so as to dismantle universal provision of welfare in favour of targeted welfare.

These people spent 9 years ruining the country and have the gall to complain about the new Government trying to fix their mess.

Unbelievable.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/13/the-incredulous-self-righteousness-of-gerry-brownlee-amy-adams-paula-bennett-and-bill-english/feed/6National held back advice on 1.9m sea rise until after election while new developments builthttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/13/national-held-back-advice-on-1-9m-sea-rise-until-after-election-while-new-developments-built/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/13/national-held-back-advice-on-1-9m-sea-rise-until-after-election-while-new-developments-built/#commentsWed, 13 Dec 2017 05:04:22 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95235

Let’s get this straight, the National Government held back a report showing no council should build near the sea because of a predicted 1.9m rise in sea levels and a new development got green lighted while they hid this report???

Today, leading scientists recommend considering between double and quadruple that amount when planning new developments. The most up-to-date advice is codified in a new guide written by scientists and policy experts for the Ministry for the Environment.

That guide has no official status, but many councils know what it says, and the public learned of its contents when it was leaked earlier this year by the Green Party.

Based on the latest science, the guide says people should be planning for 1m of sea level rise for existing neighbourhoods, and 1.9m for “green-fields” developments or redevelopments that intensify land use in already built-up areas. The goal is to avoid adding lots of new housing to areas that might one day be flooded.

Yet, in the Coromandel alone, hundreds of new, permanent land titles have been created on low-lying coast in the past two years, after modelling at most 1m of sea level rise.

In 2015, Thames-Coromandel District Council approved a subdivision of 167 coastal sections after rejecting advice from flood experts at Waikato Regional Council to consider 2m higher seas. The district council factored in 1m, instead, noting in emails to the regional council that any updated government guidance wasn’t likely to arrive in time.

These developments weren’t breaking any rules, or even going against best practice guidance, because the advice to factor in 1.9m higher seas was held back by the previous government until after the election.

The National Government knew what the report said but held it going out before the election because it would demand they had an actual plan for climate change rather than the meaningless lip service they currently provide.

That the National Government were prepared to damage so many peoples properties for such political gain is another ugly truth of the last 9 years under National.

A private charity that raises huge money to do the things the Government should really be providing? I’ve always seen KidsCan as a symptom of broken social policy rather than the solution to child poverty.

After the ‘Feed the Kids Bill’ was killed off, KidsCan was constantly trumpeted as the way we could all pretend we’d done something meaningful on child poverty, so them not gaining any new funding sounds like the first step in resetting the obligations and responsibilities of the State.

Former operations and programmes manager Clive Young, now 63, says events at the charity before he was made redundant were not normal. He says he and others at the charity had concerns about management and spending – issues which were both raised at the trial. “You’re a charity,” he says. “You’re using donated and government money. Some of the things we saw didn’t sit well and so we questioned it.”

Some of the concerns were spending decisions. As an example, Mr Young points to the use of Corporate Cabs. It’s not the cheapest taxi option but it was the charity’s chosen mode of transport. He criticises travel bookings which saw cheaper airfares missed because of poor planning. Concerns were not only how money was spent, but what it was spent on.

There was concern about efforts to avoid public criticism over the costs of running the charity. KidsCan had suffered such criticism for its Big Night In telethon where it was claimed 86 cents in every dollar donated went on administration. The sensitivity is such in the charity sector that Mrs Chapman said in a recent interview: “I am proud to say that for every dollar spent in the last three years, 80 cents or more has gone directly into our programmes for children.”

Mr Young says during his time at KidsCan there was a “reallocation” of budgets which improved the appearance of administration spending. For example, he says his “programmes” budget partly carried the cost of $90-an-hour marketing and fundraising general manager Jan Clark. “Freight, stock – that’s a programme cost but not consultants.”

…long champagne lunches on the Waterfront and parties with taxi’s home to Albany for everyone seems to be at odds with the grim reality of child poverty.

KidsCan has been lauded because it stepped in when the Government refused to do anything meaningful and that was acceptable to the majority of NZers who argue that free lunches or shoes or raincoats from the State will let parents off the hook.

It’s time the State stood up and took on these obligations, relying on a Charity that has some problematic culture issues doesn’t seem like a solution.

A letter from disgruntled Green Party staff to its MPs has revealed complaints of low morale, bad communication and unfair treatment.

It highlights how difficult the party has found the transition into government, with a greatly reduced caucus and managing new ministerial responsibilities.

The Green Party has always prided itself on its tikanga, campaigning strongly on workers rights, speaking frequently at union events and describing work as “being valued and valuing each other”.

However the letter reveals staff are unhappy with the way they’ve been treated since the party has become part of the government.

RNZ understands there has been a push from senior party staff to hire external people for key advisor roles. There was some pushback, with one minister, Julie Anne Genter, going against the directive and hiring existing staff.

The audacity of the Green Party tactics team complaining about the leadership needing to bring in talent from outside the Wellington clique is hilarious when you consider it was the total lack of anyone gaming out the damage from Metiria’s confession that cost the Greens half their vote.

This total lack of tactics has seen the Greens spend 3 years misstepping and being held hostage by the Wellington Twitteratti. The fact they almost fucked up the last election is utterly denied by everyone concerned.

The grim truth seems to be that no one inside there sees the opportunity of policy they could actually get through if they targeted specific Labour MPs and NZ First MPs for legislative gains.

The madness behind their Waka jumping legislation ‘strategy’ showed a level of incompetence that is bewildering.

Every time I see the Greens in the news headlines now it feels like the nervousness you get when the kids take the car out for a drive. You know it’s going to come back written off with a whole bunch of excuses and explanations that it was someone else’s fault.

The Greens don’t know if they are Arthur or Martha, and if they did it take a 6 month committee meeting to decide on pronouns.

The only hope now is that Marama Davidson is elected co-Leader and she can bring some stability to a Party that desperately needs to ask itself if it wants to wield real political power for real change or just be an exclusive club that makes those who are members feel special by their exclusion of others.

Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier today published the third full inspection report since his officed beefed up monitoring last year. The report looked at Christchurch Men’s prison.

His office also published follow-up reports on conditions at Arohata, Manawatu and Rolleston Prisons. Fewer than half of the changes recommended had been implemented at each site, the report said.

The Ombudsman monitors prisons and other places of detention such as locked mental health wards under the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which puts international obligations on New Zealand to ensure people held in detention are treated humanely and with decency and dignity.

…this after the National Government quietly dumped reoffending rates as a measurement of the private prison empire they have built…

The goalposts have been shifted for the Government when it comes to crime reduction.

As part of its new set of Better Public Service targets, announced on Tuesday, it has removed its target to reduce reoffending. It originally aimed to have reoffending reduced by a quarter by June this year, but only managed to bring it down by 4.5 percent.

…the National Government who had ACC invest in 30% of the private prison at Wiri and who brought private prisons into NZ and who had to remove Mt Eden from their control after corruption and violence issues quietly removed the reoffending rates as a measure of success???

What a gutless back down!

National set 25% as their target to reduce reoffending and could barely get 4.5%. They sold the neoliberal private prison reforms on how amazing they would be to reduce reoffending, the truth is they have failed abysmally and the National Government will now hide the stats so NZers can’t see how much of a failure they have created.

So who is to blame for this counter-productive cluster fuck?

Let’s start with the Corporate Mainstream media who love to manipulate your sense of anger and injustice with their ‘if it bleeds it leads’ mentality. Their crime porn myopic news headlines are designed to stoke emotion, anger and sense of injustice all for ratings.

That anger and emotion quickly gets manipulated by ‘get-tough-on-crime’ politicians who sell suffering and draconian prison time as the solution. We, the voters, get sucked into this vortex of media-politics and elect anyone who promises to punish the people we are media trained to fear and hate.

That leads to anger and hate seeping into social policy, that leads to a private prison system who send the wrong market signals to the State agencies invested in them.

We have allowed knee-jerk legislation that seeks to hurt to replace well thought out social policy.

The bail law changes which mean prisoners are spending longer and longer amounts of time in our damaged prison system. The lack of rehabilitation programs, the tying of the limited rehabilitation programs they do have to parole eligibility, the tying of prison labour to parole eligibility, the tying of an admission of guilt to parole eligibility.

All of these factors have combined to see a prison system that is releasing prisoners far more damaged than when they went into prison.

This is beyond counter-productive, it’s a kind of insanity.

Can a Labour government that didn’t expect to win change this septic wound of a social policy?

We can but hope otherwise we will continue to release men back into the community more dangerous than when they went in.

The Green Party has scrapped one of its core election promises championed by former co-leader Metiria Turei.

The party no longer believes in immediately abolishing all financial sanctions and obligations on beneficiaries.

It was forced to back down on the policy during coalition negotiations with Labour, which adjusted the wording so only “excessive” sanctions will be removed.

“Our policy is what the Government’s policy is. So now we’re in Government, we need to do what Government policy says,” says co-leader James Shaw.

“We only want to get rid of the most excessive sanctions,” he added.

The policy u-turn means the Greens will be able to support Shane Jones’ plan to sanction beneficiaries who refuse to work on the Government’s ‘Plant a Billion Trees’ project.

…this back down is because the Greens have managed to utterly blow any political leverage they had since the new Government was sworn in. This is punishment for attempting to threaten Labour & NZ First over the Waka Jumping legislation, meaning the Greens stand for the poor and beneficiaries in general has been wasted on immature power grabs.

What should have happened was the Greens should have publicly announced the immediate dispatch of Marama Davidson to Willie Jackson as the Minister of Employment and Welfare Minister Carmel Sepuloni to begin pushing carrots over sticks before Christmas for beneficiaries.

Those two Ministers would be far more open to Green ideas on dismantling this structural cruelty and the Greens could have taken some credit and had something to show those beneficiaries who were inspired to vote for them by Metiria’s brave announcement.

As it stands the Greens have lost their leverage and disappointed beneficiaries. The Greens need to spend these holidays to try and come up with a new tactics team because they are continuing to go backwards.

The new Government are well aware of how the National Party were bought out by Chinese business interests and they are aware of how much damage China could cause the NZ economy.

The latest GCSB threat list was censored because it referred to China and NZ First’s sudden move to sell our dairy to Russia was off the back of a threat by China to not buy our milk powder in response to the new Governments plans to stop foreigners buying land here.

Pacifying China until the new government can detach our economy from China’s dominance by replacing dairy with forestry and greater industry diversification will be a big challenge but Winston has the skill to pull it off while the Greens must adapt or die if they want to remain politically relevant post 2020.

Mr Twyford apologised on Checkpoint with John Campbell today for the treatment of a man who spent 58 weeks in emergency housing in a motel – costing the government $44,000, after traces of methamphetamine were found in his home.

Mr Twyford pledged to make changes to the existing regime.

Last night Checkpoint reported that Robert Erueti was evicted from his state house where he lived for more than 15 years in February last year.

Mr Twyford said yesterday Mr Erueti should never have been evicted from his HNZ home.

“I wanted to tell him that Housing New Zealand are changing their policy and they are moving to a new approach for dealing with this issue that I think is more compassionate and more considered.”

The minister said if methamphetamine traces were found now support, not eviction, would be the first approach.

“Over the last three years Housing New Zealand, on behalf of the tax payer, has spent $75 million on testing and remediating houses that are or were allegedly contaminated.”

Mr Twyford said this had left hundreds of properties empty.

…lap it up sleepy hobbits, $75million on bullshit meth hysteria propagated by ex-Police ‘clean up teams’ who have done everything in their power to demonise beneficiaries and renters.

How many were kicked out of homes for this self-interested spite?

Oh the hilarity of watching Landlords caught up in the P contamination hysteria…

Some landlords with meth-contaminated houses are avoiding telling local authorities to ensure their houses don’t lose value.

The investors say having the information on their property’s council file – even if the chemical residue is later removed – carries stigma, and will put buyers off. While the behaviour is not illegal, one home-owner’s association said it was “unscrupulous to say the least” not to report contamination, as that meant any future owners or tenants were denied access to the property’s full history.

“I think a lot of landlords are scurrying around trying to keep things under the radar because they don’t want to spend the money to properly remediate a contaminated home,” said Home Owners and Buyers Association (Hobanz) president John Gray.

“But there’s a line that has to be drawn somewhere.”

The Herald first found evidence of the trend in online property investors’ forums, where owners were discussing how to get the council to help evict tenants without the contamination going on a Land Information Memorandum (Lim) report.

Hobanz and Auckland Council confirmed they were aware of the behaviour.

Auckland Council’s regional environmental control manager Marcus Herrmann said people avoided reporting contamination for a variety of reasons, including uncertainty about remediation requirements, and the effect on their profits.

“They believe the stigma attached to having the information on their property file will affect the value of their home,” he said.

Herrmann said while there was no legal obligation, it was appropriate for landlords to inform the council to ensure health and safety of tenants and prospective owners. Methamphetamine is considered a health risk.

If a house has been a lab, police usually inform the council which then undertakes testing. However, health authorities or private owners who become aware of contamination are also expected to pass on any information.

The first time I half-heard a news report about Housing New Zealand tenants “contaminating” homes by smoking methamphetamine in them, I assumed it was a mistake. Clandestine labs, sure: they can leave behind some some hazardous chemicals, depending on the actual process employed. But a dwelling being rendered uninhabitable and needing to be torn apart simply because meth was consumed in it? It didn’t seem possible.

It isn’t possible.

…as Russell Brown painstakingly points out, houses that test positive for P being smoked in them are not the health issue that the moral panic over P has produced.

The primary method of drug testing is the urine test, but this is a terribly blunt tool.

Favoured because it’s quick and low cost, it tests for the metabolites of drugs rather than the chemicals themselves and as such it fails to differentiate between on- and off-the-clock use. That means occasional marijuana users test positive for a week or more after a single smoke.

Tests that treat recreational use as being the same as use on the job are a problem. While marijuana affects a user’s ability to work or drive safely at the time, occasional use has no lingering effects beyond a good night’s sleep. While the metabolites remain in the system for long periods, the drug’s narcotic effect is gone within a few hours. Testing for after-hours use is essentially little more than a test of character – something that can be better accomplished without chemistry.

…in NZ we are simply too immature a culture to be able to have adult discussions on drugs and effective standards for those drugs. We see the drug as illegal and ANY suggestion that it is being taken becomes the rational for firing someone or demolishing a house. We are too juvenile to comprehend that simply testing positive for a drug isn’t impairment, add to this former Police Officers keen to cash in on drug moral panic by becoming ‘drug testing companies’ and we get a perfect storm of policy designed by morons.

How many millions have been wasted on this hysteria? How many lives destroyed by throwing people out not the street?

Remember – any beneficiary caught testing positive were banned from Housing NZ for 12 months – no wonder we had 40 000 homeless and a motel policy that blew out to $50 million.

This is NZ in the 21st Century, a selfish child easily spooked into spite.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/10/meth-contamination-hysteria-finally-ends-but-how-many-lives-were-destroyed/feed/3Where the hell was the NZ media for the last 9 years?https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/10/where-the-hell-was-the-nz-media-for-the-last-9-years/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/10/where-the-hell-was-the-nz-media-for-the-last-9-years/#commentsSat, 09 Dec 2017 21:09:02 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95115

The greatest fraud in the BIMS reports that highlight the horror of National’s 9 years in power is that the NZ mainstream media unquestioningly allowed these scumbags to get away with it for a decade!

Where the hell was the NZ media for the last 9 years when the conclusions of the BIM reports were so obvious to everyone else?

Let’s call the last 9 years of National’s rule what it really was – class-austerity. A draconian policy that destroyed the most vulnerable but because media are middle class they never saw it and allowed them to get away with it.

How can we have such an apocalyptic conclusion of 9 years worth of policy failure and the vast majority of NZ media not pick up on the enormity of damage being perpetrated?

The good people at Action Station have started a petition banning pokies.

I think this would be a clusterfuck of counter productive outcomes that would make things far worse than this well intentioned but hopelessly deluded call to ban pokies.

Surely ‘reforming’ pokies would be far more successful than banning all pokies – in fact banning all pokies would drive gamblers into the arms of organised crime.

Empowering organised crime is a social policy failure – we need to violently crack down on pokie numbers & force them to only give back to the communities they are taken from.

Heavy handed Government regulation and recycling the revenue back into the communities it is taken from in the form of anti-gambling rehabilitation and poverty programs is FAR more effective than banning & driving gamblers underground into the arms of Mafia loan sharks and unregulated Triades.

The spike of violence in Dairy’s right now is due to stupid social policy pushing the price of tobacco so high and banning it in prisons they have created a perfect black market and the crime to feed it.

Banning shit rather than brutal regulation is a pathway to more negative outcomes.

Four key threats against New Zealand are cyber security, violent extremism and espionage – and one mystery threat which the intelligence community will not release.

The briefing carries a blanked-out section leaving a question mark of the fourth major threat facing New Zealand. That differs from the last briefing which identified six threats to New Zealand and detailed them all.

The original briefing included a redacted mystery threat but the GCSB has since re-issued the briefing with that threat included – instability in the South Pacific. The same threat featured in the 2014 briefing issued by the intelligence agencies.

Canterbury University academic Professor Anne Marie Brady, internationally recognised for translating China’s propaganda campaigns, said New Zealand’s Government should consider following Australia’s lead.

She said the Government should not engage in “head-butting” with China, but should strengthen its resilience against its interference.

“I am encouraging our Government to look at [what Australia has done],” she told the Herald.

She said foreign powers trying to influence other countries was not unusual, but the Communist Party’s activities in New Zealand have been “very successful and very comprehensive” and were now at a critical level.

In a public lecture at Victoria University this week, ​she said China had several strategies, including:

• Managing Chinese communities overseas through Chinese media to make them agents of Chinese foreign policy.

• Managing public opinion through multiple platforms including social media.

• Co-opting non-Chinese political elites.

Brady said Labour MP Raymond Huo and National MP Jian Yang had been pushing the party’s “United Front” strategy in New Zealand, including trying to influence Chinese-language media here.

…the behind the scenes threat by China to the new Government’s decision to block foreign investors buying into our housing market was an open question of what would happen if China just decided to not buy their share of milk powder for a month. That’s what spurred Winston’s sudden move to start talking to Russia to buy our Dairy.

The new Government and our Intelligence Agencies are painfully aware of what National’s ‘put all our cows in one Beijing paddock’ has done to us and will go to great lengths in not antagonising China publicly while frantically working behind the scenes to minimise the threat China poses to our economy.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/08/what-the-censored-gcsb-report/feed/11The myth that National are better managers of the economy has been laid bare as a sick jokehttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/08/the-myth-that-national-are-better-managers-of-the-economy-has-been-laid-bare-as-a-sick-joke/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/08/the-myth-that-national-are-better-managers-of-the-economy-has-been-laid-bare-as-a-sick-joke/#commentsThu, 07 Dec 2017 21:53:43 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95016

9 years of National Party rule

The myth that National are better managers of the economy has been laid bare as a sick joke by all these briefing papers showing the truth behind National’s vacant aspiration.

• Housing New Zealand has identified a need for a long term sustainable financial strategy as it grapples with an increased need for social housing.

Education

• State-owned universities and polytechnics have embarked on a building spree that will increase their combined debt by more than half, from $452 million at the end of last year to $697m next year, the Tertiary Education Commission says.

• The Education Review Office says it is still concerned about the quality of some home-based early childhood education services. A review of home-based early education is one of the office’s six immediate priorities, along with reviewing learning support, Special Education Grants, guidance counsellor funding, teacher training and more effective school evaluation.

• Education Minister Chris Hipkins will receive an Education Ministry report this month setting out a business case for education growth in Auckland over the next 10 years.

• The Education Ministry says it planned to provide a Cabinet paper for Hipkins last month on extending the voluntary bonding scheme to all Auckland schools.

And the organisation will seek the minister’s views on a range of other issues affecting the frontline including gangs and family harm, fleeing drivers and road policing.

• Pressure on the criminal justice system pipeline is currently the sector’s most “significant challenge”.

Transport

• The Ministry of Transport has told new Transport Minister Phil Twyford that rapid technological changes are making it more difficult to estimate future infrastructure demand, raising the risk of over-investing in some physical projects and a poor return. Things like smart vehicle-to-vehicle technologies allowing more vehicles to travel on roads, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing are on the horizon.

• The Ministry of Transport says “we are reaching the stage where expensive land acquisitions or tunnels would be required to expand major transport corridors, making these developments prohibitively expensive or disruptive”. “In Auckland, there are few opportunities to build or expand transport corridors due to its challenging geography. Auckland’s motorway network will be largely complete once the Western Ring Route is constructed.”

Conservation

– Continued decline of native threatened species – Insufficient knowledge of species biology, populations, distribution and threats – A biodiversity challenge that extends beyond public conservation lands and waters, that government cannot address alone– Insufficient understanding of the contribution of our unique nature and heritage to our nation’s economic, cultural and social success is not well understood by the public– The need to deepen effective and enduring relationships with our Treaty partners in a post-settlement era– Unprecedented growth in tourism is changing funding needs, and expectations of the department – putting pressure on facilities, but creating opportunities to increase investment in conservation

Immigration

• Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway has been told to expect “significant changes” at Immigration New Zealand’s Visa Services branch. The agency’s offshore presence will be reduced from 17 locations to five.

• The agency said the changes were part of efforts to further enhance its technology platforms and simplify end-to-end visa application process.

• The minister was also told that three reports would be released in early 2018, which will include visa transitions and outcomes of international students, the labour markets of temporary migration and the annual Migration Trends report.

Internal Affairs

• Archives NZ is in crisis and its ability to function is compromised by the lack of space and earthquake safety issues. New buildings are required. There is no longer space to accept anything new in Wellington.

Christchurch regeneration

• The Government wants to make sure taxpayers don’t fork out too much for the rebuild of Christchurch, incoming Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods was told in handover documents.

Natural disasters

• The Earthquake Commission accepts that “mistakes and missteps” were made after the devastating Canterbury earthquake sequence 2010-2011.

Defence and national security

• Up to one in six deployed personnel could have some form of long-term mental health issue arising from experiences during service.

The commission intends to ask Twyford to enact better rental legislation that gives more security towards tenants with children and vulnerable adults.

• Steps by police to tackle hate crimes and racism are currently “insufficient”. Details of the crimes need to be recorded by a central system.

• There is an urgent need to reduce the risk of radicalisation and violent extremism by using community-based strategies and programmes to support residents, the Human Rights Commission warned.

Social tensions can arise between diverse communities as pressures upon housing, social services, misunderstandings of New Zealand’s social norms and an increase in cultural and religious differences. The commission suggested an increased emphasis on education to foster a sense of inclusiveness between and among communities.

• Almost a quarter of Kiwis identify as having a disability, the Human Rights Commission identified. This is due to increase with New Zealand’s ageing population.

This group do not fare as well as non-disabled people. They are twice as likely to be unemployed, earn $200 less a week when they are employed and 20 per cent of them are under-utilised and want more work (compared with 5 per cent in the general labour market). Disabled children are more likely to be bullied and the number not in education, employment or training is four times higher than the mainstream.

The Disability Rights Commissioner will focus on education and employment sectors as key areas that determine a person’s life course.

• The Human Rights Commission is challenged by fewer staff than it had a decade ago and tight organisational funding. Since 2007 it has undergone two significant restructures to manage cost pressures and put staff on a performance-based pay system.

• New Zealand has one of the highest rates of residential mobility among developed countries. It is nearly twice that of the United Kingdom. This is accompanied by very low levels of social housing tenancies and decreasing levels of home ownership.

…National’s economic agenda over the last 9 years has been to open the floodgates of cheap immigration to fuel a speculative property bubble to keep the property speculating middle classes believing they were millionaires based on their over inflated house prices while privatising public assets to subsidise their corporate farmer mates irrigation plans and slashing welfare to pay for the tax cuts.

The obviousness of this hollowing out of public services and the social damage their property speculation, draconian welfare reforms and mass migration has created are no longer hidden but the contemptuous denial by 44% of the voting electorate means none of this will be acknowledged.

If the new Government are serious about the problems confronting them, they must be prepared to use the looming economic crash as an opportunity to rebuild the entire public service and re-regulation of the economy using borrowed money that goes outside the self-imposed boundaries Labour & the Greens have committed themselves to in order to not spook our corporate overlords, because when the crash comes our Corporate Overlords will be the least of our problems.

To truly comprehend the madness that is driving Trump’s insane Middle East agenda, you need to understand the crazy self-fulfilling evangelical death cult prophesy that is directing him.

Trump has declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel for two reasons. The first is the powerful and aggressive zionist lobby group in America who funds him and the second is the crazy far right evangelical voting block who won him the election.

For this voting block, the Bible is a literal version of events, not a metaphorical one. They believe the Earth is less than 10 000 years old, they believe climate change won’t flood the planet because God showed Noah a rainbow and they believe that the end of times and Armageddon could be upon us and they will all be raptured away to heaven.

How big is this voting block? A terrifying 50 million Americans consider themselves evangelical to this extent.

What’s more terrifying than that number of ignorant voters? That they all have a self-fulfilling evangelical death cult prophesy that sees creating conflict in Israel as the beginning of Armageddon.

There are some 50 million Evangelicals in the US who believe in theliteral truth of Bible prophecy. You can argue theological accuracy all youwant. This massive block of citizens possesses unshakable belief that theend of the world will be heralded by a series of prophetic events some ofwhich have occurred (e.g. 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina) some of which areongoing (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

I am not talking about Bible-thumping, street-corner ravers, though oneor two do appear in our film. The people we profiled — from Evangelicalleaders to rank-and-file believers — are for the most part formidable,intelligent, well-educated. And all are fixated upon Israel (the land ofChrist’s return).

Waiting for Armageddon opens with James and Laura Bagg, an attractivepair of 30-something jet-propulsion engineers living in Connecticut. Yes,Evangelical rocket scientists from the Northeast.

“We could be raptured out of this world during this interview,” Laurasays, referring to a miracle where all good Christians disappear from earthand rematerialize in the clouds as chaos seizes the world. “There will becar crashes and plane crashes. And the people left behind will be asking,‘Are they coming back for me?’”

Then James Bagg explains that, “You see God has a plan for the worldand it all centers around Israel.”

The Baggs are, in a way, typical. Millions of Evangelicals share onepolitical belief even more sacred perhaps than opposition to abortion orsame-sex marriage: The belief that Israel must remain a Jewish stateforever.

If that sounds unfamiliar or contradictory, then you’ve never spent muchtime listening to Evangelicals. End Times theology declares that the Jewishpeople must maintain control of Israel and Jerusalem, and retake the Al-AqsaMosque (a/k/a the Dome of the Rock), or Jesus won’t return. Period.Understand, they are talking about mankind’s ultimate salvation. And if thatmeans embracing foretold disasters and wars including the Battle ofArmageddon, so be it.

Professor Gary Dickerson from the all-Christian Corban College puts itthis way: “I don’t look at the wars in the Middle East with the hope thatthings will work out. We’ve been told, Israel will experience this distressall the way to the end.”

Thus comes the central political reality explored in Waiting for Armageddon: that Evangelicals risk creating what the Rev. Barbara Rossing calls “a self-fulfilling prophesy of death and destruction.”

…these religious fanatic lunatics believe that generating conflict in Israel will bring about their great war in the Valley of Armageddon which will herald the ends times as promised in the Book of Revelations.

They believe they will all be raptured to heaven and the planet will descend into a 7 year supernatural battle between mankind, the Anti-Christ and God.

The viciously crazy evangelical Vice President, Mike Pence, was the one pushing for this Jerusalem Capital and he’s pushing for it for the same insane reasons his far right Evangelical voters want it, to create their self-fulfilling Evangelical death cult prophesy.

This is what is forming American Foreign policy, and Trump’s agreement is merely pandering to this self-fulfilling Evangelical death cult prophesy so he can keep their votes.

Far-right Evangelical voters are happy to ignore his pussy grabbing because he’s going to inadvertently start the violence in the Middles East that gives them their self-fulfilling evangelical death cult prophesy.

How many times can I say self-fulfilling Evangelical death cult prophesy?

This. Is. Fucking. Insanity!

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/08/the-self-fulfilling-evangelical-death-cult-prophesy-that-pushed-trump-into-declaring-jerusalem-the-capital-of-israel/feed/24If having 290 000 kids in poverty is a ‘success’ I’d hate to see failure in NZhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/08/if-having-290-000-kids-in-poverty-is-a-success-id-hate-to-see-failure-in-nz/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/08/if-having-290-000-kids-in-poverty-is-a-success-id-hate-to-see-failure-in-nz/#commentsThu, 07 Dec 2017 20:48:52 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=95019

Because of our 30 year neoliberal cultural myth that success is an individual victory and poverty is a personal choice, our media generated hatred towards the poor and beneficiaries means levels of poverty are tolerated rather than genuine social policies that help.

Why do we always talk about ‘children’ in poverty? Because property speculating middle NZ doesn’t care about adults in poverty and have to have their compassion switched on by thinking of the kids

How grim and accepting of poverty in New Zealand have we become when 290 00 kids living in poverty can be considered any kind of ‘success‘…

The report of the latest Child Poverty Monitor showed 12 per cent of children, or 135,000, were living in material hardship – in households without seven or more items, from a total list of 17, which are considered necessary for their wellbeing. That was down from 14 per cent or 155,000 in 2016.

There were 70,000 New Zealand children – or six per cent – who were experiencing the worst material hardship, with households missing out on 9 or more items from the list of 17 – down from 8 per cent or 85,000 last year.

A one per cent drop of the number of children living in low income homes saw 27 per cent – 290,000 – in homes where money was tight and were considered to be in income poverty.

….one of the most important cultural developments National have managed to infect and mutate the debate with is this pretence of attempting to seperate the truly materially poor from just the usual poor.

There are 290 000 children in poverty, but separating out the material hardship and the worst material hardship is a clever way of destroying universal provision of social services to just teose worst case examples.

It’s a magnificent and deceptive way for National to impose neoliberal culture into social welfare provision. They destroy universal provision of welfare in favour of targeted welfare using big data.

Instead of paying for an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, the neoliberal system just wants to pay for the hearse.

We need to reject this attempt to differentiate the poor from the utterly destitute because it’s a mere political illusion that pretends to be doing something when in reality it is only allowing the problem to get more damaged.

Rescuing 10 children from homelessness while ignoring the 100 children in State houses that can’t be fed is not a solution, it is a twisted sick lie used to ease middle class pretensions of equality without threatening their illusion of wealth from grotesquely over inflated house prices with a capital gains tax to truly pay for a proper social welfare network.

In its most benign form it paints us out as an inward looking nation of dimwitted simple folk who can’t comprehend the bigger picture, in its darkest version, it illuminates the aggressively deep anti-intellectual fascism that violently destroys out of wilful insecurity.

This week has really reminded us just what a nation of sleepy hobbits we are.

Toxic drinking water, foreign students effectively slaves, petrol price gouging, climate change rapidly getting out of hand and news that National underfunded public health so badly that it has gone into meltdown are all indicative of one thing – the legacy of our free market neoliberal experiment that deregulated every inch of our society.

Normally one would feel a certain schadenfreude towards the sleepy hobbits of muddle Nu Zilind for the clusterfuck they have brought upon themselves, but such shameful glee in the misfortune of others is only gleeful if the target understands their own hand in their predicament, the sleepy hobbits of Muddle Nu Zilind don’t have the intellectual ability to comprehend how they have brought this upon themselves and if you attempted to explain it is the deregulated market they’ve unthinkingly voted for they would ask what ‘deregulated’, ‘market’ and ‘unthinkingly’ meant.

We are our own worst enemies.

I’ll leave the final word to Chris Trotter on NZ being a nation of ‘sleepy hobbits’…

Tolkien’s fantasy is much more realistic. His Shire is not overthrown by rampaging Orcs, but by the fear and greed of its own inhabitants. As the steadfast Farmer Cotton explains to Frodo:

“It all began with Pimple, as we call him … and it began as soon as you’d gone off, Mr Frodo. He’d funny ideas, had Pimple. Seems he wanted to own everything himself, and then order other folk about. It soon came out that he already did own a sight more than was good for him; and he was always grabbing more, though where he got the money was a mystery: mills and malt-houses and inns, and farms, and leaf-plantations. He’d already bought Sandyman’s mill before he came to Bag End, seemingly.”

If that doesn’t remind New Zealanders of the fate of their own beautiful country, then Martyn’s right, we really have become “Sleepy Hobbits”! Or, maybe, something even worse. Could it be that we, too, have fallen victim to our own Pimples, our own Ted Sandymans? That far too many of us have allowed ourselves to be ordered around by the Shirrifs? The Boss? By Sharkey?

We must hope not. Because in our own case – in our own Shire – we cannot rely upon four returning heroes to put things right. “Raising the Shire” is something we will have to do on our own. Forging our own swords. Stringing our own bows. Summoning our own neighbours. Only when we have fashioned our own horns and bugles will we, like Tolkien’s Hobbits in revolt, be able to send their clarion blasts echoing across New Zealand’s fields, towns and cities:

When Trump spinelessly and gutlessly acquiesced to the Apartheid Israel wet dream fantasy of America recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, we all shrugged and believed he was just greasing up to the powerful Israeli lobby group to get money for his campaign.

The mere idea that America would wilfully ignite a powder keg in the occupied territories of Palestine was unthinkable, the shock waves of such a malicious decision would be far ranging and could easily slide the region into war.

I’d like to think that this fuckwit baboon of a human being has decided one way to take the heat off domestic issues is to start a conflict in Palestine, but I don’t even believe he has that level of awareness or strategic competency, I don’t think he has any sense of what he is about to unleash in Israel.

The Palestinian people who have been brutalised, terrorised, murdered, beaten and defiled by an Israeli population still in the aggressive cultural grip of processing a genocide, will refuse utterly this move and it will unleash a counter protest we haven’t seen in our life time.

The sheer stupidity of Trump caving into Apartheid Israeli’s will become the new American foreign affairs calamity.

We are in for dark days comrades.

Climate change has invited Famine and Death, Trump has invited Conquest and War.

We have the makings of our Apocalypse in the valley of Armageddon.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/07/trump-recognising-jerusalem-as-israels-capital-the-stupidest-most-corrupt-most-unthinking-most-damaged-and-most-infantile-decision-of-his-entire-stupid-corrupt-unthinking-damaged-infan/feed/46How Steven Joyce killed NZ music & how a new youth radio station could save ithttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/06/how-steven-joyce-killed-nz-music-how-a-new-youth-radio-station-could-save-it/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/06/how-steven-joyce-killed-nz-music-how-a-new-youth-radio-station-could-save-it/#commentsWed, 06 Dec 2017 01:33:38 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=94988

Sure we have Lorde, but she is a supernatural being of musical talent, her ability is utterly innate, for the rest of our musicians and artists, they require a nurturing environment to be able to advance.

The Herald looked at the stats which have seen Kiwi songs in the charts plummet and they’ve offered some ideas and thoughts about why we have seen this.

The general thrust of the Herald’s argument seems to be that music piracy so destroyed the economic model that no one wanted to bother putting any investment into NZ talent any longer.

I think there is some truth in that, but there are I believe other dynamics that had more impact and there are still solutions in front of us.

In my opinion, the lynchpin to the explosion of NZ music in the 1990s was my old radio station, the Channel Z network. As an alternative music station with 30% NZ music, Channel Z acted as a means for new songs to get market tested and that made it far easier for Music Directors from other commercial stations to pick up tracks and put them onto their rotate that they never would have touched.

It was Channel Z’s ability to break new NZ music and influence other radio play stations that created the environment where bands could get radio airplay and generate momentum.

How is Steven Joyce to blame for all of this? As the owner of the Rock and the Edge, he was the first to realise that you didn’t need to have local DJs on local stations when you could broadcast one DJ show to the entire country.

Not only did his model gut the talent of provincial broadcasters, it set in place the duopoly we have now. The Edge was given Channel Z’s Auckland frequency and the one network that was actually impacting and influencing the other playlists stopped having its influence, which is when we start seeing the collapse in kiwi songs in the charts.

When Channel Z was converted into Kiwi FM, it immediately became a music ghetto for every other radio station in NZ. The Rock, the Edge, ZM etc etc would simply point any NZ artist in the direction of Kiwi FM rather than bother adding them to their stations music playlist.

Kiwi FMs 100% NZ music quota couldn’t compete with overseas music and it ended up sucking NZ music out of the other stations. So it couldn’t generate listeners and its existence was an excuse for other stations to not bother playing NZ tracks.

The old joke was ‘what is shit brown and can’t fly’? Kiwi FM.

The dynamics and profit motives of the radio stations and their stale, safe playlists stopped the advance of NZ music, which is what happens whenever you get any kind of market duopoly.

What should happen to those frequencies should be a new publicly funded youth radio station (RNZ2?) with a 50% NZ music quota and 50% overseas music so that it can compete with the other youth commercial radio stations while also influencing their respective playlists.

We need this new youth radio network to be a circuit breaker from the safe main commercial stations while promoting an array of interesting and fascinating radio shows for youth by youth.

If we are to get more NZ music into the charts, we need a radio station outside the current duopoly that influences those other radio stations.

We have the frequencies, we certainly have the broadcasting talent within The Wireless community at Radio NZ and we would have a solution to influencing the other commercial playlists.

What we need is a new Broadcasting Minister with vision.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/06/how-steven-joyce-killed-nz-music-how-a-new-youth-radio-station-could-save-it/feed/7Shane Jones didn’t ‘misspeak’, he knew exactly who he was talking to and why Labour will fight to stop coalition document from being releasedhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/05/shane-jones-didnt-misspeak-he-knew-exactly-who-he-was-talking-to-and-why-labour-will-fight-to-stop-coalition-document-from-being-released/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/05/shane-jones-didnt-misspeak-he-knew-exactly-who-he-was-talking-to-and-why-labour-will-fight-to-stop-coalition-document-from-being-released/#commentsMon, 04 Dec 2017 19:13:05 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=94921

He knows full well that it isn’t a work for the dole program, he knows that beneficiaries will be paid the dole and the regional fund he has will top those benefits up to minimum wage.

While it isn’t a work for the dole program (because workers will be getting the actual minimum wage), Jones is reaching out to National voters and rewarding NZ First voters with all the rhetoric.

But that audience was secondary to who he was really speaking to because the real target of Jones was Grant Robertson.

NZ First are deeply convinced an enormous economic crash is looming and their nationalistic economic response sees Forestry as a crucial part of the response to that looming economic crash. Jones wants to make it clear to Robertson that despite Grant’s public assurances to the Business community that he and the Greens will be subservient to our corporate overlords, NZ First’s agreement demands he steps outside that fiscal straight jacket and borrow the money for this developmental agenda.

This need to keep the business community pacified with austerity vs the realities of needing to borrow more to repair the vast social damage 9 years of National has generated is the real friction point in the new Government.

The reason NZ First want it released and the reason why Labour don’t want it released is because it is a far more radical document than Labour would ever publicly want spelt out.

Many still don’t appreciate how the negotiations shaped this new Government in ways most wouldn’t have guessed. It was Winston’s naked hatred of neoliberalism that decided the fate of this new Government. NZ First wants to go far further in reforming the hegemonic economic structure than Labour could ever imagine to suggest in public.

That’s not to suggest there aren’t some revolutionary sparks inside this Labour Government, but they are hiding until it’s time to flare up.

The trick for Grant Robertson will be to know when to jump from promising obedience to the business elites to an interventionist Government responding to the latest cascade failure of global free market capitalism.

NZ First are making it clear they are preparing for that eventuality, Labour are waiting to see it.

]]>https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/05/shane-jones-didnt-misspeak-he-knew-exactly-who-he-was-talking-to-and-why-labour-will-fight-to-stop-coalition-document-from-being-released/feed/22At some point the new Government have to acknowledge a positivity campaign only works with a fair Oppositionhttps://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/03/at-some-point-the-new-government-have-to-acknowledge-a-positivity-campaign-only-works-with-a-fair-opposition/
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/12/03/at-some-point-the-new-government-have-to-acknowledge-a-positivity-campaign-only-works-with-a-fair-opposition/#commentsSun, 03 Dec 2017 04:17:27 +0000https://thedailyblog.co.nz/?p=94850

Don’t be fooled

The new Government has to understand that the only people who care about constructive Opposition are the people who already vote for them.

The Right will win at all costs, Key’s Office colluded with the SIS to smear Phil Goff in the months leading up to the 2011 election, Key lied about mass surveillance to win 2014 and Steven Joyce and Bill English lied directly to the nation about an $11.7billion hole that never existed.

The viciousness and tactical genius of Bridges to simply spook the new Government into handing over huge advantage in select committees they can use to grind down any legislative change highlights this ruthlessness.

Sunshine and happiness are great. And Jacinda should be championing that style of progressive democracy, but someone has got to stand up and start punching back!

The new Government has got to start assembling their hit team.

Jacinda owns her style and leads with it, but then someone else has to be doing all the attacking on her behalf.

This is what National will do, Bill English will come across as the steady hand who is tough but can be fair and make deals while Bridges, Joyce, Collins, Amy Adams and Margaret Barry go for the throat every time.

The team that starts fighting back hard should be…

Shane Jones – his performance today on Q+A was masterclass Shane Jones. His wit and his oratory skills are needed now more than ever. He needs to lead debate against the National Opposition.

Kiri Allan – is a political superstar who if given the space could make for blistering responses to social policy criticism.

James Shaw – Could be relentlessly attacking National on lack of climate change planning in every economic comment they make.

Ruth Dyson – She is one of labour’s fiercest an most under utilised attack players.

Willie Jackson – Broadcasting background makes him very quick on his feet and perfect for sound bites.

Michael Wood – The little General is one of Labour’s future stars, excellent and laser like in attack.

Greg O’Connor – Former Police hard man, needs to step up as an enforcer in Parliament.

Ron Mark – An old school head kicker, needs to be turned lose on National.

When Joyce lied about the fiscal hole, Jacinda continued the positivity campaign which doesn’t work if you are fighting a dirty opponent and there isn’t an opponent more dirty than National. Waiting as long as labour did to respond was just enough perceived weakness to turn voters back to National in the latter part of the campaign.

Jacinda can stay above the fray, but she needs a team of push back agents so her Ministers can get on with the job at hand who can fight National in the bear pit.